The Modern Educator's Library 



EDUCATION 

ITS DATA AND 

FIRST PRINCIPLES 






Booki/fi 



PRESENTED BY" 



THE MODERN EDUCATOR'S LIBRARY 

(general Editor — Prof. A, A. Cock 

EDUCATION : 

ITS DATA AND FIRST PRINCIPLES 



^^ 



BY 



Tv 'PERCY NUNN, 

M.A., D.Sc. 

PROFESSOR OF EDUCATION IN THE UNIVERSITY OF LONDON 

AUTHOR OF "the AIMS AND ACHIEVEMENTS OF SCIENTIFIC METHOD,' 

" THE TEACHING OF ALGEBRA," ETC. 



NEW YORK 

LONGMANS, GREEN AND CO. 
LONDON: EDWARD ARNOLD 

1920 

[.All rights reserved] 



O jvii> 






v^> 



Printed in England 



Gift 

Publisher 



EDITOR'S PREFACE 

The Modern Educator's Library has been designed to give 
considered expositions of the best theory and practice in 
English education of to-day. It is planned to cover the 
principal problems of educational theory in general, of 
curriculum and organization, of some unexhausted aspects 
of the history of education, and of special branches of 
applied education. 

The Editor and his colleagues have had in view the 
needs of young teachers and of those training to be teachers, 
but since the school and the schoolmaster are not the sole 
factors in the educative process, it is hoped that educators 
in general (and which of us is not in some sense or other 
an educator ?) as well as the professional schoolmaster may 
find in the series some help in understanding precept and 
practice in education of to-day and to-morrow. For we 
have borne in mind not only what is but what ought to be. 
To exhibit the educator's work as a vocation requiring the 
best possible preparation is the spirit in which these volumes 
have been written. 

No artificial uniformity has been sought or imposed, and 
while the Editor is responsible for the series in general, the 
responsibility for the opinions expressed in each volume rests 
solely with its author. 

ALBERT A. COCK. 
University Collegr, 

SotTTHAlMPTGN. 



AUTHOR'S PEEFACE 

This book is addressed to two classes of readers. It offers to 
professional students a preliminary survey of the whole field 
of educational theory and practice; while the wider public, 
whose enlightened interest is the mainspring of social progress, 
may, I hope, find in its pages something to stimulate reflection 
upon those larger issues which must be determined, if at all, 
by the consensus of their opinion. In outlining such a survey, 
in collecting materials for such reflection, I am aware that I 
have attempted what has often been done before. But as 
knowledge and experience grow, and as the spiritual atmo- 
sphere of an age changes, there is always room for another 
attempt — especially, perhaps, for one that presents the data 
of education, as they are presented here, from a definite point 
of view. In short, an author need apologize not for doing the 
thing again, but only for not doing it better. 

Before a reader commits himself to following an argument, 
he is entitled to know in a general way whither it seeks to lead 
him. I may say, then, that my purpose is to reassert the claim 
of Individuality to be regarded as the supreme educational 
end, and to protect that ideal against both the misprision of 
its critics and the incautious advocacy of some of its friends. 
I believe that a sane and courageous pursuit of the principle 
of individuality in education is above all things necessary, 
if our civilization is to strengthen its now precarious foothold 
between the tyranny of the few and the tyranny of the many. 

It is my pleasant duty to acknowledge many helpful 
criticisms I have received from my colleagues, Professor John 
Adams of the University of London and Professor Bompas 



vi AUTHOR'S PREFACE 

Smith of the University of Manchester, and to thank my 
friends, Captain F. A. Cavenagh and Mr. J. C. Hague, for help- 
ing me to make smoother many rough places in my exposition. 
I have also to thank the editor of the Educational Times for 
permission to incorporate an article on play published, some 
years ago, in that journal, and the editor of the Mathenoatical 
Gazette for allowing me to use some paragraphs from my 
presidential address to the Mathematical Association. 

As an officer of the London County Council, I am required 
by the regulations to state that the Council is in no degree 
responsible for any of the opinions that stand under my 
name. 

T. P. NUNN. 

LOTSfDON. 

January, 1920. 



CONTENTS 



CHAPTER 

editor's pebface 
author's preface - 
i. the aim of education 
ii. life and individuality 
iii. the will to live - 
iv. the living past 
v. the relations between horme and mneme 
vi. routine and ritual 

VII. PLAY ..... 

VIIL THE " PLAY WAY " IN EDUCATION - 
IX. NATURE AND NURTURE 

X. IMITATION . - - . . 

XL INSTINCT ..... 

XII. THE GROWTH OF THE SELF 

XIII. THE MECHANISM OF KNOWLEDGE AND ACTION 

XIV. THE DEVELOPMENT OF KNOWLEDGE 
XV. THE SCHOOL AND THE INDIVIDUAL 

INDEX ..... 



PAQE 

iii 

V 

1 

10 

23 

33 

42 

58 

68 

89 

104 

119 

130 

140 

160 

177 

195 

221 



VI 1 



CHAPTER I 

THE AIM OF EDUCATION 

" Every art," said Aristotle in his famous exordium, " is 
thought to aim at some good." Now education, as we shall 
consider it in this book, is certainly an art. It is reasonable, 
then, to begin by asking at what good it aims. 

There is no lack of confident answers to the question. 
The purpose of education, one says, is to form character; 
another, to prepare for complete living ; a third, to produce a 
sound mind in a sound body ; and the series of replies of this 
kind could easily be continued. All of them seem satisfactory 
until, pursuing the matter farther, we ask what kind of 
character it is desirable to " form," what activities " complete 
living " includes, or what are the marks of a healthy mind. 
We then find, as Dr. M. W. Keatinge has trenchantly pointed 
out, that the success of these attempts to state a universal 
aim for education is largely illusory, being due chiefly to the 
happy fact that every one may, within wide limits, interpret 
them exactly as he pleases. For A.'s idea of a fine character 
turns out to be either ridiculous or rankly offensive to B.; 
what 0. regards as complete living would be a spiritual death 
for D.; while the mens sana in corpore sano that E. reveres, 
F. loathes as the soul of a prig housed in the body of a bar- 
barian. In face of such discoveries a cynic might declare 
that the real use of the maxims we have quoted is to conceal, 
as behind a verbal fog-screen, differences of educational faith 
and practice too radical to be harmonized and too serious to be 
exposed to the public view. 

The origin of these unhappy differences is easily disclosed. 

1 



2 EDUCATION: DATA AND FIRST PRINCIPLES 

Every scheme of education being, at bottom, a practical 
philosophy, necessarily touches life at every point. Hence 
/any educational aims which are concrete enough to give 
definite guidance are correlative to ideals of life — and, as 
ideals of life are eternally at variance, their conflict will be 
reflected in educational theories. For example, if the " Greek 
view of life " cannot be reconciled with that of the Puritan 
reformers, it is idle to look for harmony between the concep- 
tions of education that sprang from them. Moreover, it is 
not only true that no ideal of life has for long reigned un- 
challenged over civilized men, even of the same race and 
nation; we must also recognize that among the nominal 
followers of an ideal there are always rival sections, doubtful 
adherents and secret rebels. Is it wonderful, then, that the 
prophets of education constantly gainsay one another and that 
the plain man knows not where to turn for truth ? 

The root of the trouble doubtless lies in the complexity of 
human nature, and especially in one of its strangest paradoxes. 
From one standpoint men seem like solitary inhabitants of 
islands, each sundered from the rest by an impassable sea. 
Your spirit, for example, and mine can communicate in- 
directly and clumsily by means of the sounds our lips utter 
and the written or printed marks our fingers frame ; but there 
is no direct touch between us and no community of being: 
you are for ever you and I, I. Yet from another standpoint 
men are seen most truly to be every one members one of 
another. We come into the world with minds as empty as our 
bodies are naked; and just as our bodies are clothed by others' 
hands, so our spirits are furnished with vfhat enters into 
them from other spirits. Stripped of these borrowings we 
could hardly live, and should certainly be less than human . 

When men philosophize about life they are prone to lay 
exclusive stress upon one or other of its contradictory aspects. 
Thus to many thinkers of post-Reformation Europe the 
individual life seemed not only self-contained but also self- 
sufficient; men, they held, formed themselves into societies 



THE AIM OF EDUCATION 3 

only because the life according to nature, besides being 
"solitary," was also "poor, nasty, brutish, short." This 
exaggerated individualism was followed, when it had run its 
dramatic course in history, by a reaction which reached its 
theoretical climax in the pages of Hegel. Here Hobbes' order 
is completely reversed : society, instead of being the offspring 
of man's invention, becomes the parent of his spiritual being. 
Conceived in the hardened form of the State, it is a super- 
personal entity, a Leviathan in a sense Hobbes never reached, 
of which the single life is but a fugitive element — an age-long 
spiritual life from which the individual spirit, with its private 
will and conscience, drawls whatever measure of reality it 
possesses. 

Each of these rival ideas arose, as philosophies generally 
arise, out of the social and political conditions of the time, and, 
in turn, reacted strongly both upon those conditions and upon 
the educational practice that reflected them. For the results 
in the former case the reader must consult the historians, but 
the bitter fruit of the Hegelian ideas has ripened and been 
gathered under his own eyes. It would be absurd as well as 
unjust to charge upon any philosopher the whole guilt of 
Armageddon; for philosophers, as we have said, only give 
definite form and direction to movements which are stirring 
vaguely and irresistibly in a million minds around them.^ 
Nevertheless the connection between the World War and 
Hegelianism is too close to be ignored. From the idealist of 
Jena more than from any other source, the Prussian mind 
derived its fanatical belief in the absolute value of the State, 
its deadly doctrine that the State can admit no moral authority 
greater than its own, and the corollary that the educational 
system, from the primary school to the university, should be 
used as an instrument to engrain these notions into the soul 
of a whole people. 

^ And it should be remembered that a noble line of British thinkers — 
e.g., T. H. Green, the Cairds, F. H. Bradley, B. Bosanquet, Lord Haldane, 
Sir H. Jones — have drawn inspiration from Hegel. 



4 EDUCATION: DATA AND FIRST PRINCIPLES 

The most urgent question before the educators of to-day 
is whether they are to foster this sinister tradition or to help 
humanity to escape from it to something better. There can, 
of course, be no return to tlie doctrine of Hobbes ; his leader- 
ship would be quite as fatal as Hegel's. The idea that social 
bonds are imposed upon the individual from without and 
accepted under the terms of a ** social contract " has, in fact, 
long been exploded. It is now recognized universally that they 
originate within man's nature and are woven inextricably 
into the texture of his being. The strongest " self-regarding " 
impulses cannot fashion a life that would not fall to pieces 
if the social elements were withdrawn. The most original 
personality is unintelligible apart from the social medium in 
which it grows ; no Thoreau could hide himself so deeply in the 
woods as to escape from the social in his own mind. What 
is needed is not the repudiation of these facts, but a doctrine 
which, while admitting their full significance, yet reasserts the 
importance of the individual and safeguards his indefeasible 
rights. 

Such a doctrine we seek to set out in these pages and to 
make the basis of a stable educational policy. We shall stand 
throughout on the position that nothing good enters into the 
human world except in and through the free activities of 
individual men and women, and that educational practice must 
be shaped to accord with that truth . This view does not deny 
or minimize the responsibilities of a man to his fellows : for the 
individual life can develop only in terms of its own nature, 
and that is social as truly as it is " self -regarding." Nor does 
it deny the value of tradition and " discipline " or exclude the 
influences of religion. But it does deny the reality of any 
super-personal entity of which the single life, taken by itself, 
is but an insignificant element. It reaffirms the infinite value 
of the individual person ; it reasserts his ultimate responsibility 
for his own destiny ; and it accepts all the practical corollaries 
that assertion implies. 



THE AIM OF EDUCATION 5 

Returning to an earlier remark, we may state the position 
in another way. While every man tends to draw his ideal of 
life largely from the inspiration of others, yet it may be main- 
tained that, in a perfectly good sense of the words, each must 
have his own unique ideal. It is the sense in which every work 
of art — for instance, every poem — has its own ideal. A poet 
who recognizes that his creative impulse has failed would never 
point to another poem and say, " That is what I intended to 
do." His ideal was concrete, and to be embodied, if at all, 
in his poem and in no other. It marks the perfect achievement 
from which Ids work has fallen short ; not a goal that another 
has or might have reached. It follows that there can be no 
universal aim of education if that aim is to include the asser- 
tion of any particular ideal of life ; for there are as many ideals 
as there are persons. Educational efforts must, it would seem,^ 
be limited to securing for every one the conditions under 
which individuality is most completely developed — that is, 
to enabling him to make his original contribution to the 
variegated whole of human life as full and as truly character- 
istic as his nature permits ; the form of the contribution being 
left to the individual as something which each must, in living 
and by living, forge out for himself. 

We shall have to inquire shortly whether this view is sup- 
ported by the facts of human development — that is, whether 
it is based upon the solid ground of nature or only upon an 
amiable illusion. That will be our task in the following 
chapters. Meanwhile it may be useful to indicate some 
of its consequences and to discount some misconceptions to 
which it is liable. 

Our doctrine, as stated crudely above, may seem to permit 
no discrimination between good and bad ideals of life — 
between forms of individuality that ought to be encouraged 
and forms that ought to be suppressed. Is the schoolmaster, it 
may be asked, to foster with impartial sympathy the making 
both of an Emile Pasteur and a Cesare Borgia ? We reply that 



6 EDUCATION: DATA AND FIRST PRINCIPLES 

the ultimate responsibility of a child for himself does not free 
the others from responsibihty towards him; an educator is not 
to foster a bad life on the ground that it promises to achieve 
the uniqueness of a good poem. There are things as certainly 
destructive of the soul as prussic acid is of the body. Life is 
fenced round with prohibitions which the young explorer must 
not be allowed to ignore. But within the circle thus marked 
out there is infinite room for his activity. It takes all sorts 
to make a world, and the world becomes richer the better each 
becomes after his own kind. Even where the moral law is 
positive and not merely permissive, obedience may take forms 
endless and incalculable: thus a motorist, it has been said, 
best shows his love for his neighbour by keeping to the left 
of the road. The point need not be laboured. It is manifest 
that there is no limit to the number of life-patterns into which 
good or blameless actions may be woven, and that it is im- 
possible to formulate in advance the concrete principle of 
excellence of any of them. 

We may go farther, and say that the prudent teacher will 
take care not to multiply his prohibitions beyond necessity. 
Few things are more difficult than to foresee whether a new 
type of individuality, a new form of expression in thought or 
action, will ultimately add to or detract from the real riches of 
the world. It is fatally easy to condemn as contrary to beauty, 
truth, or goodness what merelyruns counter to our conservative 
prejudices. We know how often in the past men have sought 
to suppress the creative activity whose fruits have later been 
seen to be among mankind's greatest treasures. We need to 
remind ourselves — teachers, perhaps, more than laymen — that 
these " old, unhappy, far-ofi things " are constantly being 
repeated and paralleled, now in trivial instances, now in 
matters of serious importance. The younger of this generation 
have seen the " futurists " break away from the tradition of 
painting — a portent met here with ridicule, there with anger, 
with active reprobation all round. Their elders remember that 



THE AIM OF EDUCATION 7 

the same phenomena attended (how incredible it is I) the 
emergence of Wagner and the " music of the future." And 
how long is it since the entrance of women into medical 
studies shook Victorian England to the very foundations of 
its respectability ? E pur si muove. The teacher will do well, 
then, always to have in mind the warning of GramalieP and to 
beware lest haply he should be found to fight against Grod. In 
particular, he must be careful, in teaching social duties, not to 
seek to confine his pupils to the purview of an outworn text. 
Social obligations can be discharged in an infinite number of 
ways, and none can foresee or set bounds to ,vhat the human 
spirit may do in this as in all other directions. A daring and 
powerful soul may raise the whole moral quality of the social 
structure by asserting an individuality that may at first seem 
hostile to its very existence. And the unheroic soul, too, will 
best serve society by becoming most fully and truly himself. 
In short, the claims of society upon its members are best 
satisfied, not when each is made as like his fellows as possible, 
but when, in Dr. Bosanquet's language, " he values himself as 
the inheritor of the gifts and surroundings that are focused 
in him, and which it is his business to raise to their highest 
power." 

The reader may have noticed that we have so far avoided 
a very difficult question — namely, whether society (or, to be 
precise, the State) may not at times of crisis demand from its 
members services that entail the supersession, even the final 
sacrifice, of their individual development, and whether an 
affirmative answer would not greatly weaken the general force 
of our argument. To this we may reply that mankind is not 
condemned for ever to endure its present evils ; if there is a 
will to escape from them, its nobler spirits (" Saluons ces genies 
futurs 1") will certainly find a way. But if it is lawful to dream 

^ Also, perhaps, the aspiration of Aaabole France: " Esperons dans ces 
efcres inconcevabies qui sorbironb un jour de rhoinme, comme rhomme est 
aorti de la brute. Saluons ces genies futurs !" — Le Jardin d' Epicure. 



8 EDUCATION: DATA AND FIRST PRINCIPLES 

of a world in which the good of all would be much more nearly 
the good of each than it is at present, it is lawful to do whatever 
may help to make the dream reality. WTiat, then, could 
education do better than to strengthen men's sense of the worth 
of individuality — their own and others' — teaching them to 
esteem the individual life, not, indeed, as a private possession, 
but as the only means by which real value can enter the world ? 
In this, it may be claimed, is the strongest bulwark of freedom 
and the firmest guarantee against the rule of violence. 

Some who are satisfied that the intentions of our doctrine 
are good may yet doubt whether they are practicable. Does it 
not require, if not a separate school, at least a separate curri- 
culum for every pupil ? Here again we insist that we do not 
seek to change the unchangeable conditions of human exist- 
ence, but merely to make the best use of them. Individuality 
develops only in a social atmosphere where it can feed on 
common interests and common activities. All we demand 
is that it shall have free scope, within the common life, to grow 
in its own way, and that it shall not be warped from its ideal 
bent by forces "heavy as frost and deep almost as life." 
Under such conditions some boys and girls will show themselves 
to be by nature secluded and cloistral spirits, and it is to the 
general interest that they should be allowed to be so.^ But the 
crowd and the hero have such potent influence that few are 
likely in their development to wander far from the established 
types. In short, individuality is by no means the same thing 
as eccentricity. Teachers are not called upon to manufacture 
it deliberately, but merely to let it grow unimpeded out of the 
materials of each child's nature, fashioned by whatever forces, 
strong or weak, that nature may include. 

It is the common boast of Englishmen that throughout 
their history they have clung stubbornly to the idea of 

* The poet Shelley is a classic example of a type poignantly illustrated 
in the author of the recently published "Diary of a Dead Officer." Miss 
May Sinclair has vividly realized it in one of ^le characters of her novel, 
"The Tree of Heaven." 



THE AIM OF EDUCATION 9 

individual liberty and have refused to exchange it for anymore 
specious but delusive good. The worst charge that can be 
brought against them is that in refusing equal liberty to others 
they have too often sinned against the light that is in them. 
Upon what basis does that historic claim to liberty rest if not 
upon the truth, seen darkly by some, by others clearly 
envisaged, that freedom for each to conduct life's adventure 
in his own way and to make the best he can of it is the one 
universal ideal sanctioned by nature and approved by reason ; 
and that the beckoning gleams of other ideals are but broken 
lights from this ? That freedom is, in truth, the condition, 
if not the source, of all the higher goods. Apart from it duty 
has no meaning, self-sacrifice no value, authority no sanction. 
It ofEers the one possible foundation for a brotherhood of 
nations, the only basis upon which men can join together to 
build the city of God. Hunger for it is the secret source of 
much of the restless fever of our age. By a paradox, as superb 
as cruel, millions of men who share our speech, and millions 
more who share our hopes, have given up their own claims to it, 
so that in the end it may become the law of the world. For if 
" to make the world safe for democracy " means not this, it 
can mean nothing but to exchange one tyranny for another. 
Dare we take a lower, and can we find a higher, ideal to be 
our inspiration and guide in education ? 

NOTES ON BOOKS, ETC. 

John Abams, "The Evolution of Educational Theory" (Macmillan, 
1912), gives the most compreheiisive and illuminating review^ of the subject. 
M. W. Kkatinge, " Studies in Education" (Black, 1916), contains au acute 
criticism of educational aims. J, Welton, " What do we mean by Educa- 
tion ?" (Macmillan, 1915), develops the relation between educational theory 
and ideals of life. Two volumes in the Home University Librar}^ (Williams 
and Norgate) give, with bibliographical references, a clear account of the 
movements associated in the text with Hobbes and Hegel: G. P. GoocH, 
"Political Thought from Bacon to Halifax," and E. Barker, "Political 
Thought from Spencer to To-day." The Hegelian position is brilliantly 
criticized in L. T. Hobhouse, "The Metaphysical Theory of the State" 
(Allen and Unwin, 1918). It receives a more friendly treatment in Muir- 
HEAD and Hetherington, "Social Purpose" (Allen and Unwin, 1918). 



CHAPTER II 

LIFE AND INDIVIDUALITY 

The central notion of the last chapter may be compressed into 
an aphorism : Individuality is the ideal of Life. To call it an 
ideal implies that it is at once a goal of effort and a standard 
by which the success of the effort may be judged; also that it 
is something that may be approached indefinitely yet never 
reached. What is, then, its precise character ? 

To answer that question it will be helpful to develop farther 
the comparison (p. 5) between a man's life and a work of art. 
For every one will agree, on the one hand, that individuality 
is in some sense the goal and standard of aesthetic creation, 
and, on the other hand, that the individuality of a poem, a 
sonata, a picture, a statue, is a partial expression of the artist's 
own. It is not diflSicult, therefore, to see that aesthetic activity 
shows, in a peculiarly concentrated and energetic form, 
characters that actually belong to life in all its modes of 
expression. 

The more prominent of those characters are easily recog- 
nized. In the first place, the artist strives to express through 
his materials a single scheme, in which the elements, however 
diverse in nature, have each its place, not accidental or irrele- 
vant, but necessary and meaningful. He succeeds in so far 
as he can impose upon them this "unity in diversity " ; he fails 
in so far as they break from his control. In the second place, 
aesthetic creation is autonomous. This does not mean that a 
poet is independent of grammar and logic, that a musician 
need not regard the natural properties of chords and progres- 

10 



LIFE AND INDIVIDUALITY 11 

sions, or a painter the form and structure of his model. But 
it does mean that there is no external law determining before- 
hand the use he may make of these things. Eighteenth- 
century critics censured the " incorrectness " of Shakespeare, 
but a wiser generation recognizes that the plays have a logic 
of their own which can be judged only by its results.-^ 

To speak of individuality as the ideal of life implies, then, 
that life as a whole is autonomous and that it constantly 
strives after unity. Upon the first point we have already said 
enough in the preceding chapter ; we need add only that auto- 
nomy, as defined above, is the essence of man's "freedom" 
as a self-determining agent. The statement that man's will 
is free is ridiculous if understood as a claim that he can escape 
from the laws of his own nature ; but it is sound sense when 
understood as extending to the whole of life the obvious truth 
that it is impossible to invent a machine before it is invented or 
to compose a sonata before it is composed. 

The second point could be illustrated in a thousand ways 
from every phase of human life. Unity in diversity is, for 
instance, the clear mark of all purposive actions, from (say) 
the skilled handling of knife and fork in eating a chop to the 
world-wide operations of a Napoleon of finance. Again, it is 
the mark of all knowledge, from the power to " perceive " 
objects and events, such as tables and chairs and the move- 
ments of taxi-cabs,^ to the power to understand the behaviour 
of a planet or a system of metaphysics. This unity, whether 
shown in action or in understanding, is always a partial ex- 
pression of the individual's unity, and is felt by him as a pulse 
of the energy which is the very stuff of his life. And that it 

^ Similarly, an inveutor must, of course, take account of the properties 
of his materials and the laws of physics, but no one can prescribe the use 
he is to make of them. To do so would be to invent the machine before it is 
invented. {Gf. Bosanquet, "The Principle of Individuality and Value," 
p. 331.) 

2 Whenever, for example, I recognize an object as a chair, a great number 
of vary ditfarent former exparieaoe^ contribute to the present experience 
and help to give it its character. 



12 EDUCATION: DATA AND FIRST PRINCIPLES 

extends, potentially, to the whole of life is shown by the fas- 
cination of any well told biography in which the writer brings 
out the unity which his subject's life strove after, and shows 
where and how it was broken and frustrated. Needless to 
say, the art of the novel and the drama draws largely from the 
same source of interest. 

We have undertaken (p. 5) to seek a scientific basis for 
this view of life, and must now proceed to fix the general 
lines of our inquiry. But before we can do so, a very difl&cult 
question must be faced and answered. What we have said 
about individuality has been applied, so far, only to man's 
conscious nature or " mind "; but reflection will show that 
it can be said with equal truth about his body, and, indeed, 
about the bodies of all animals and even about plants. Eor, 
from the first division of the fertilized egg, bodily growth 
suggests everywhere the unfolding of a unitary plan, or the 
concerted action of individuals who thoroughly understand 
one another and have devoted themselves to a common pur- 
pose. ■"• Thus the history of the bodily organs may be likened 
to the parts of a piece of polyphonic music wherein each pur- 
sues its own melodic course, yet takes account all the time 
of the other parts and of the musical whole they are conspiring 
to realize. And in growing to its final form the body seems 
to show only in a less degree than the mind the same quality 
of self-determination.^ It seems clear, then, that whatever 
explanation we give of the broad facts of life must apply, 
in principle, equally to body and to mind. Hence the ques- 
tion : Are we, since our bodies are " matter," to seek in physi- 
cal laws an explanation for the whole of life ; or are we, since 
our bodies are alive, to interpret their activities by what we 
know of life where its character appears in the highest 

1 Of. "Die Pflauze bildeb Zellen, nicht die Zelle bildet Pflanzen" (De 
Bary). ''Each part acts as if it knew what the other parts are doing" 
(Naseli). (Quoted by T. H. Morgan.) 

2 We have, in fact, borrowed the term "autonomy" from the biologist 
Hans Driesch, who applies it in this sense to the facts of morphogenesis. 



LIFE AND INDIVIDUALITY 13 

and clearest form — namely, in the conscious life of the 
mind ? 

The urgency of the question lies in the fact that men of 
science, and particularly physiologists, generally seek to inter- 
pret the life of the body entirely in terms of facts and notions 
derived from physics and chemistry. This tendency (or preju- 
dice) is natural. The ultimate elements of the body are the 
familiar chemical elements, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, and 
the rest, combined in forms which can often be reproduced in 
the laboratory ; the water of the body is ordinary water^ and 
behaves as such; the oxygen we breathe does the usual work 
of oxygen, breaking down compounds and setting free heat; 
the net heat- value of food consumed is precisely equal to the 
heat-value of the mechanical work the body performs, just 
as it is in the steam-engine or petrol-motor. Immersed in 
discoveries of this order, and seeing their number daily in- 
creased, it is not surprising that physiologists come to think 
of the body as nothing but an exceedingly complicated physico- 
chemical machine. Theirs is, in fact, essentially the view of 
Descartes which made so much stir in the seventeenth century 
— namely, that man might be regarded as only a very cun- 
ningly fashioned automaton if we did not know from inner 
experience that he has a soul. 

Descartes did not shrink — at least in theory — from the 
deduction that where, as in the case of other animals, direct 
knowledge of a soul is impossible, we need not suppose the 
creature to be anything more than a bete-machine. Thus (he 
would have said) the cry uttered by a beaten dog is an event 
essentially of the same order as the emission of sound by a bell, 
and no logic compels us to ascribe it to pain. No modern 
biologists would go so far as that, at least where the higher 
animals are concerned; but their scruples necessarily bring 

1 It is even maintained that the aqueous solution which foims the 
basis of the blood-plasm has the composition of the ancient seas wheiein 
life probably began. 



14 EDUCATION: DATA AND IIRST PRINCIPLES 

them face to face with an awkward dilemma. Either mental 
facts belong to a distinct province of being whose connection 
with physiological facts must be for ever inscrutable, or else 
they, too, are reducible somehow to facts of physics and 
chemistry. 

Most advocates of the " mechanistic conception of life " 
elect, prudently, if unheroically, the former course ;i but there 
are bolder spirits who do not shrink from the latter. Of these 
Dr. Jacques Loeb is at present the most thorough-going and 
daring representative. His experiments on artificial fertiliza- 
tion, on the artificially directed growth of animals, and on the 
" tropistic " factors in instinct, are undoubtedly most im- 
pressive. They have given him the hope — perhaps we must 
not call it a pious hope — that a physico-chemical explanation 
will be found in time for all the " wishes and hopes, efforts and 
struggles, . . . disappointments and sufferings " that form 
" the contents of life from the cradle to the bier." 

Meanwhile, psychologists, who do not welcome the annex- 
ation of mental facts by physics and chemistry, have been 
hard put to it to formulate a view which shall at once satisfy 
the just claims of those sciences and preserve the prerogative 
position of mind in life. For Descartes sundered body and 
mindso effectively that he was himself unable, except byamost 
unconvincing tour de force, to bring them together again ; and 
he left the problem practically insoluble for his successors. 
Most of them have been driven, therefore, to a position which 
answers almost completely to that of the less intransigent 
mechanists. In brief, they treat the mind, or, rather, " experi- 
ence " as if it were a self-contained field of events and causation 
which has some inscrutable connection with bodily events, 
but plays no part in determining them. To hold this 
view — in the form called the "doctrine of psycho-physical 

1 For a statement of this position see D'Arcy Thompson's brilliant 
article in the volume " Finite Life and Individuality," edited by Wildon 
Carr (Williams and Norgate, 1919). 



LIFE AND INDIVIDUALITY 15 

parallelism " — has long been, and perhaps still is, orthodoxy 
in psychology. 

But the labours of an increasing company of workers seem 
to promise an end to this unhappy divorce between the sciences 
of body and of mind. We may take the work of Professor H. S. 
Jennings of Pennsylvania University as typical of them. This 
writer, like most of his school, has directed his studies chiefly 
to the behaviour of the lower organisms. Here, if anywhere, 
it should be possible to analyze life into chemical and physical 
reactions, and Jennings' earlier researches were definitely 
guided by the mechanistic conception.-' 

But after long familiarity with the ways of these lowly 
creatures he was forced to the conclusion that physics and 
chemistry are insufiicient to explain even the simplest forms 
of animal life. The animal's life is, of course, permeated (as 
human physiology is) by chemical and physical factors; but 
just as a poem, though permeated by grammar, is more than 
a sum of grammatical expressions, so the behaviour, even of a 
protozoan, escapes beyond tlie conception of a physico-chemical 
machine. In short, the humblest creature is autonomous. 

The facts that converted Jennings to this view may be 
illustrated by some of his observations on the stentor — a single- 
celled, trumpet-shaped inf usorian that dwells in marshy pools, 
attached to a water-plant or bit of debris, surrounds the lower 
end of its body by a translucent tube into which it can with- 
draw at need, and lives by agitating the cilia round the disc 
that (nearly) closes its trumpet and so whipping up vortices 
which carry food-particles into its mouth. When a stream 
of water containing carmine impinges against its disc, the 
stentor will at first drive the particles in the usual way into 
its mouth, but very soon begins to twist on its stalk and bend 
its trumpet away from the intrusive cloud. If several repeti- 
tions of this movement do not relieve it from the presence of 

^ Tliis phase of his work is represented by the citations in the first chapter 
of Professor C. Lloyd Morgan's " Animal Behaviour." 



16 EDUCATION: DATA AND FIRST PRINCIPLES 

the irritant, another reaction is tried; the ciliary movement 
is suddenly reversed, so that the particles are now thrown off 
the disc. If this manoeuvre also fails, the animal contracts 
into its tube, remains there for about half a minute, then again 
emerges, unfolds its disc, and begins once more to move its 
cilia in the normal direction. A most interesting question 
now arises. The original conditions being restored, will the 
original sequence of reactions be repeated ? The answer is 
definitely, No. As soon as the carmine reaches it, the stentor 
at once withdraws into its tube for a while, and continues to do 
so, remaining for a longer period each time, as often as, on 
re-emerging, it receives the particles upon its disc. Finally, 
it forces itself free from its attachment by violent contractions, 
quits its tube, and swims away to resume the business of life 
elsewhere. 

In describing these "reactions" it is difficult to avoid 
using terms one would employ without risk of censure in 
speaking of the analogous behaviour of a higher animal, such 
as a dog or a man. One is almost irresistibly tempted to say 
that this minute creature, after trying in vain all the minor 
devices at its disposal for getting rid of an annoying intrusion, 
adopts in despair the last resort of flight from an intolerable 
situation. In fact, viewed from without, the behaviour of the 
infusorian and the behaviour of the mammal would seem to 
differ only in details, not at all in principle. And this im- 
pression has become the more firmly established in the minds 
of many cautious and highly experienced observers the more 
they have studied the ways of these lowly creatures. Thus 
Jennings suggests that if the amoeba — a tiny speck of living 
slime, without limbs or organs or even a definite form — were 
large enough to come within men's ordinary ken, they would 
regard it as " controlled by the same elemental impulses as 
higher beasts of prey." Moreover, he subscribes to the 
opinion, expressed by Dr. Raymond Pearl with regard to 
rather higher animals (the planar ia) that " it is almost an 



LIFE AND INDIVIDUALITY 17 

absolute necessity that one should become familiar, or perhaps 
better, intimate with an organism, so that he knows it in some- 
what the same way that he knows a person, before he can get 
even an approximation of the truth regarding its behaviour." 

These biological studies give one a lively sense of a solidarity 
in nature running through the wholegamut of animal existence. 
They teach us that all animals, from the amoeba upwards, are 
centres of energy, in constant dynamical relations with the 
world, yet confronting it in a characteristic attitude of inde- 
pendence. Each one in its own way " does trade with time 
and has commerce with circumstance," shaping its course in 
accordance with its nature and its powers, and developing 
in its traffic with its world an individuality, rudimentary or 
complex, whose ways cannot be foreseen unless one knows it 
** in somewhat the same way that he knows a person." In 
short, stupendous as the distance is between the lives of the 
protozoan and the creature who has been made a little lower 
than the angels, it consists — like the difference between a 
village church and a cathedral — not in any radical unlikeness 
of the essential features, but rather in the differing richness, 
variety and subtlety of the details in which a single scheme 
has been worked out at different evolutionary levels. 

But while we emphasize the fundamental identity of all 
animal life, we must not fail to appreciate the enormous 
differences in the degree of " perfection " it achieves at its 
widely-sundered levels. On the lower levels the animal's 
intercourse with the world is narrowly limited in range. Even 
when, as in the sea-anemone, definite " receptors," that is, 
specially sensitive cells, are developed in the creature's surface, 
commerce with the environment is mediated at first only by 
direct contact or chemical action . At a higher level * ' distance 
receptors" are added, that is, cells sensitive to such agencies 
as light and sound. Transactions of a vastly greater range 
and complexity now become possible, and with them a much 
higher degree of individuality. Finally we reach in man a 

2 



18 EDUCATION: DATA AND FIRST PRINCIPLES 

being who can shape his course by reference to the impalpable 
and invisible objects of the intellect, can look before and after, 
and must nourish his life with spiritual as well as material 
realities. How far down the scale of being receptors are, in 
the proper sense of the term, sense-organs, it is impossible 
to say. Judging from what we know of the lower strata of 
our own organism, we may well suppose their activity in such 
creatures as the stentor to be utterly unconscious. But some- 
where in the phylogenetic history the stimulation of receptors 
must have begun to be the occasion of a " dim sentience " 
which was to develop in time into man's clear awareness of an 
ordered world about him. And in whatever guise experience 
thus emerged, we must believe that it came, not as a super- 
fluity, or as something disconnected with what went before, 
but as a means of widening and enriching the sphere of vital 
activities — a means of raising individuality, so to speak, to 
still higher powers. 

Upon this view man is not to be conceived as Descartes 
conceived him — namely, as an automaton plus a soul, or, as 
Bpictetus put it, " a ghost in a corpse." He is, through and 
through, a single organism, a " body-mind," the latest term 
of an evolutionary process in which living substance has de- 
veloped ever higher and more subtle functions. This view is 
as remote as possible from materialism ; for though it invites 
the physiologist to push as far as he can his physico-chemical 
analysis, it refuses to regard perception and thought, feeling 
and will, as superfluous additions to a machine that would be 
complete without them. It preserves to the psychical all 
that ethics and religion require. It spiritualizes the body; 
it does not materialize the soul. 

To sum up the discussion : Of the alternative ways of inter- 
preting life (p. 12), the second is emphatically the one to be 
followed. Starting from the position that there is more than 
physics and chemistry even in the humblest animal, it comes 
to view the history of life as a striving towards the individuality 



LIFE AND INDIVIDUALITY 19 

which is expressed most clearly and richly in man's conscious 
nature, and finds, therefore, in that goal towards which the 
whole creation moves the true interpretation of its earlier 
efforts. 

From that view two important consequences immediately 
follow. One is that the criterion of educational effort laid 
down provisionally in the first chapter is justified by a sound 
reading of biological facts; for the education that aims at 
fostering individuality is the only education " according to 
nature." The other is that to limit the idea of individuality 
to the things of the mind is to take far too narrow a view of 
its scope. Individuality is an affair of the whole organism 
or " body-mind." The process we see shaping itself in the 
mind of a boy or girl is only the highest aspect of a process 
that actually involves the whole being, and includes move- 
ments that go back to pre-human days and even to the dateless 
beginnings of life. For a child is in literal truth the heir of the 
ages; he carries his inheritance, living, in his organism, and 
his individuality is what he ultimately makes of it. 

Of the writers who, with clear awareness of its import, 
have followed our method in modern times, one of the first 
and most notable was Samuel Butler, the author of " Ere- 
whon," who upheld it as a criticism of what he regarded, 
perhaps with imperfect justice, as the mechanistic heresy of 
Charles Darwin. Butler argued, for instance, that the facts 
of habit, of physical growth, of physiological functioning, of 
instinct, of heredity, can be understood only if we regard them 
as a group of phenomena whose typical character is ex- 
pressed most clearly in memory — most clearly there, because 
in memory we are directly conscious that the past is reassert- 
ing itself in the present. Following the principle that the less 
well known should be explained in terms of the better known, 
Butler boldly maintained that they should all be ascribed 
to the operation of "unconscious memory." Similarly he 



20 EDUCATION: DATA AND FIRST PRINCIPLES 

suggested that the emergence in history of such a limb as the 
crab's claw can be understood only if regarded as due to an 
unconscious factor entirely homologous with conscious human 
invention ; the pincers which the carpenter uses for the same 
kind of purpose being, in fact, only a detachable limb, just 
as the claw is a permanently attached tool. 

Butler's whimsical and malicious genius always prompted 
him so to phrase his arguments as to shake men most rudely 
out of their dogmatic slumber. Even the reader whose mind 
has been prepared by the preceding pages may be startled 
by the thought that the father of all crabs " invented " his 
pincer-claws and that his descendants continue to grow them 
because they " remember " that their forefathers have always 
done so. The phrases " unconscious invention " and " un- 
conscious memory " contain, in fact, a contradiction which 
makes such statements seem grossly paradoxical. It will be 
useful, therefore, to substitute for them terms which may be 
employed to do justice to Butler's facts without awaking 
divergent associations. 

In the first place, then, we need a name for the funda- 
mental property expressed in the incessant adjustments and 
adventures that make up the tissue of life. We are directly 
aware of that property in our conscious activities as an element 
of" drive," "urge," or felt tendency towards an end. Psycho- 
logists call it conation and give the name conative process to 
any train of conscious activity which is dominated by such a 
drive and receives from it the characters of unity in diversity 
and what Dr. Bosanquet has called " coherent adaptiveness 
and progressiveness." For instance, the reader's endeavour 
to understand the present sentence is a conative process in 
which a relatively complex system of mental acts moves 
towards a more or less clearly envisaged end. 

Now, although the behaviour of the stentor described on 
pp. 15-16 is essentially of the same character as this, we must 
hesitate to ascribe it to conation, for we have no good reason 



LIFE AND INDIVIDUALITY 21 

to suppose that the creature is conscious either of the carmine 
or of the end to which his movements are directed. And it is 
here important to observe that even reading, unquestionably 
a conative process, involves movements and adjustments of 
the eyes which, being unconscious, cannot be ascribed to 
conation, though they have the same general character as 
conative processes. For the reader's eye does not, like his 
spectacles, function merely as an optical instrument; its be- 
haviour is the purposive behaviour of a living organ which 
enjoys, within the empire of the organism, a certain measure 
of responsible autonomy. Moreover, while the reader's 
mind is pursuing the printed argument, his neuro-muscular 
mechanisms are keeping his head aloft upon his shoulders, 
his digestive glands are dealing with his latest meal, his phago- 
cytes are, perhaps, wrestling quietly with an invasion of the 
bacilli of influenza. None of these purposive processes may 
be called conative, for they lie below, and even far below, the 
conscious level ; yet a supra-human spectator, who could watch 
our mental behaviour in the same direct way as we can observe 
physical events, would see them all as instances of the same 
class, variant in detail but alike (as we have said) in general 
plan. In other words, he would see that they all difier from 
purely mechanical processes by the presence of an internal 
" drive," and differ from one another only in the material in 
which the drive works and the character of the ends towards 
which it is directed. 

To this element of drive or urge, whether it occurs in the 
conscious life of men and the higher animals, or in the uncon- 
scious activities of their bodies and the (presumably) uncon- 
scious behaviour of lower animals, we propose to give a 
single name — horme [opp-y))}- In accordance with this pro- 
posal all the purposive processes of the organism are hormic 
processes, conative processes being the sub-class whose 
members have the special mark of being conscious. 

^ This term is not altogether a neologism. It is used in a kindred sense 
by some recent writers on psychology. 



22 EDUCATION: DATA AND FIRST PRINCIPLES 

Similarly we shall bring together under a common designa- 
tion all the varied phenomena referred by Butler to memory, 
conscious or unconscious. Following the German biologist 
Richard Semon, we shall speak of such phenomena as mnemic 
and shall give the name mneme (h-^'Wv) to the property 
of living substance which they exemplify. Memory, then, is 
conscious mneme just as conation is conscious horme. 

In the task of analyzing in outline the development of the 
human individual the concepts of horme and mneme will be 
our constant guides. It will be well, therefore, to begin our 
investigation with a somewhat fuller inquiry into the nature 
and the forms assumed by these fundamental aspects or 
factors of vital activities. That inquiry will occupy us in 
the next three chapters. 

NOTES ON BOOKS, ETC. 

B. BOSANQTTET, "The Principle of Individuality and Value" and "The 
Value and Destiny of the Individual" (Macmillan, 1912, 1913), contain 
a masterly treatment of individuality from the neo-Hegelian standpoint. 
J. LoEB, "The Mechanistic Conception of Life " (Cambridge Univertity Tresf^, 
1912). H. S. Jenning's views are quoted from his "Behaviour of I,ower 
Organisms" (Macmillan, 1906). Hans Driesch's views are conveniently 
summarized in "The Problem of Individuality" (Macmillan, lUU). 
Samuel Butler's doctrine is set out in his "Life and Habit" and "Un- 
conscious Memory " (Fifield, new ed., 1910), and has been recently reasserted 
with much power in A. D. Darbisuire, "An Introduction to a Biology" 
(Cassell, 1917). For the general position taken up in Chapter II. see L. T. 
HoBHorsE, "Development and Purpose" (Macmillan, 1913) and the 
writings of Professor S. At-exander, especially his foithcr.ming (lifford 
Lectures, " Space, Time and Deity." In several respects it was— as Pro- 
fessor John Adams has kindly pointed out to the author — anticipated in 
E. Beneke, "Lehrbuch der Psychologie " (1833). J. A. Thomson, 
" Secrets of Animal Life " (Melrose, 1919), contains several charming essays 
bearing upon the subject of this chapter. 



CHAPTER III 

THE WILL TO LIVE 

HoRME, as we have defined the term, is the basis of the activi- 
ties that differentiate the living animal from dead matter and, 
therefore, of what we have described as the animal's character- 
istic attitude of independence towards its world. The sense 
in which "independence" is used here needs elucidation. 
No creature is independent of its world in the sense that it 
could exist apart from it; pre vented from assimilating matter 
from the environment in the form of food, it would soon cease 
to live. We may go farther, and admit that the intimacy 
of the relations between a living organism and its environment 
is, as Dr. J. S. Haldane has pointed out, one of the main differ- 
ences between it and a mere machine. Matter from the en- 
vironment is constantly flowing into and out of the organism, 
being, in Dr. Haldane's vigorous phrase, only for a while 
" caught up in the whirl " of its bodily structure. And the 
same is true of an organism's psychical activities, which could 
neither develop nor be sustained unless it were in constant 
intercourse with the world about it. For instance, a great 
part of a man's psychical activity is evidently dependent upon 
intercourse with his fellows and would perish if he were iso- 
lated. Thus it may be said that the texture of man's mind, 
like that of his body, consists in what is from time to time 
" caught up in the whirl " of its structure in perception, in 
thought, in all the acts involved in the common social life. 
Nevertheless, every animal, so long as it is alive, continues 
to affirm or assert itself over against the world of which, from 

23 



24 EDUCATION: DATA AND FIRST PRINCIPLES 

another point of view, it is merely a part. Even the least 
" assertive " of us must recognize that this attitude belongs 
to every moment of our conscious lives. In every act we 
say to our world, openly or implicitly, " I am here and to be 
reckoned with; I go a way that is, so far as may be, my own 
way and not merely yours." And our bodies say the same 
thing after their own manner. Throughout the whole range 
of life this attitude prevails, from the amoeba, in which it is 
but a bare, unconscious "will to live," to man, who con- 
sciously claims a share in the moulding of his own destiny. 

Speaking broadly, we may say that the self-affirmation or 
self-assertion of the organism in the face of its world is shown 
in activities of two types, conservative and creative. The 
distinction is a familiar one. On the bodily level it corre- 
sponds to the difference between the adult, whose features, 
figure and constitution have reached a settled and relatively 
stable form, and the stripling, who, in all these respects, is 
fluent and progressive. On the psychical level it is the differ- 
ence between old-fogeyism, with its attachment to old habits, 
old friends, old books and old stories, and eager youth hurry- 
ing hot-footed from one phase of thought or action to the next. 
But clear as is the distinction between the two aspects of 
activity, it is by no means absolute. Even in so conservative 
a character as Mr. Woodhouse (the father of Jane Austen's 
Enmia) there is something more than the obstinate perpetua- 
tion of an acquired way of life. For the old way has to be 
pursued in the face of a constantly changing situation, and 
this adaptation itself implies the creative element. It is still 
more evident that conservation is an indispensable element 
in creation. The mathematician can discover a new theorem 
only if he retains command of the multiplication table; the 
scientific investigator advances mainly by reshaping or ex- 
tending the hypotheses of his forerunners; the methods of 
the modernist in art, music or poetry are the old methods 
remoulded or combined afresh; and the most daring statesman 



THE WILL TO LIVE 25 

rarely does more than give a novel turn to some ancient 
political idea. In short, conservation and creation are factors 
in all self-assertion, and what distinguishes one type of 
activity from another is not the presence or absence of 
one of them, but their relative prominence. Keeping this 
qualification in mind, we may briefly examine some examples 
of the two types. 

Recent physiology af!ords exquisite illustrations of the 
conservative activities of the organism on the bodily level. 
Let us take as an instance respiration in man. It has, of 
course, long been known that the function of breathing is to 
supply the body, through the blood, with oxygen, part of 
which is returned to the lungs and there excreted as carbon 
dioxide. What was not suspected before the delicate re- 
searches of Dr. J. S. Haldane of Oxford, Professor Yandell 
Henderson of Yale and their collaborators was the extra- 
ordinary complexity and efficiency of the arrangements by 
which the quantities of the gases that enter and leave the 
blood are regulated. It appears that carbon dioxide is not, 
as used to be supposed, merely a poison to be got rid of ; its 
presence in the blood in a certain degree of concentration 
proves to be as necessary to life as the presence of oxygen. 
To maintain this concentration, the rate and depth of the 
breathing are, from moment to moment, so regulated that the 
pressure of the carbon dioxide in the air-spaces of the lungs 
remains at an average of almost exactly 40 mm. of mercury, 
no matter whether one is at rest or at work, and no matter, 
within wide limits, in what kind of atmosphere. The reader 
must not think that by deliberate rapid or slow breathing he 
can affect that average ; the depth of his breathing will auto- 
matically be adjusted to frustrate his efforts. So delicate 
is the adjustment that, if the concentration of carbon dioxide 
in the air-spaces rises by 0-2 per cent., the rate of ventilation 
of the lungs is doubled, while, if it be lowered by the same 
amount, breathing entirely ceases. 



26 EDUCATION: DATA AND FIRST PRINCIPLES 

The regulation of the supply of oxygen is at least equally 
striking. Normally the thin, moist lung-cells that separate 
the air and the blood take up the oxygen and pass it inwards 
until its pressure within the blood is the same as in the air- 
spaces. A dead membrane could do as much. But when, as 
at high altitudes, the body, by reason of the rarefaction of the 
air, begins to suffer from oxygen-starvation, the cell (in Dr. 
Haldane's words) "suddenly reminds us that it is alive"; 
for it begins actively to secrete oxygen inwards so as to pile 
up the pressure of the gas in the blood. The readjustment in 
this case takes some time — hence the blue lips and sickness 
of the mountaineer. It is hardly necessary to point out how 
relevant this new knowledge is to the problems of flight in 
aeroplanes at high altitudes, a field in which Dr. Haldane 
and his collaborators were busied in applying it during 
the Great War. 

Conservation on the psychical level is a subtler thing, but no 
less real. It is shown partly in the sense of "personal identity" 
which normally abides with us, partly in an equally abiding 
sense of familiarity with, of being at home in, one's material 
and social world ; a feeling of competence to confront it even 
if for the moment it presents a strange or hostile face. These 
are perhaps aspects or components of a feeling that our hormic 
processes "belong together," and so may be shared by the 
higher animals. The loss or serious weakening of one or both 
of them is a well-recognized symptom of mental disease. 
The " organic regulation " of breathing and other physio- 
logical functions is paralleled by what we may call " psychical 
regulation." This is shown in the fact — which would be most 
impressive if it were not so familiar — that lives, to all appear- 
ance equally satisfying, can be lived under the most diverse 
conditions of fortune and of circumstance. It is also shown 
whenever, our present world being too heavy for us, hope 
denies its permanence, or fantasy, in dreams and day-dreams, 
calls a new one into existence to redress the balance. Here is 



THE WILL TO LIVE 27 

a perfectly normal function which, when violently exaggerated, 
appears as delusional insanity. 

Turning now to the organism's creative activities, we find 
them typified on the bodily level by the phenomena of growth. 
Every animal, beginning as a single cell, gradually builds the 
matter caught up in the whirl of its life into a character- 
istic bodily form. The fact that this form is always based 
upon its ancestors' reminds us that here, as everywhere else, 
horme and mneme work together, but should not blind us to 
the significance of growth as a genuinely creative process. 
Specially interesting in this connection is the regulation 
that secures the development of the typical bodily form of an 
animal in spite of serious disturbances in the normal condi- 
tions of growth. We may refer here to the well-known ex- 
periments of Driesch on the sea-urchin. By pressing an egg 
between glass plates, Dr. Driesch compelled the embryo to 
develop for some time as a flat layer of cells instead of in the 
normal, roughly spherical, shape; nevertheless it grew, after 
the removal of the pressure, into a quite irreproachable sea- 
urchin. The experiments of T. H. Morgan and others on 
the regeneration of the lost parts of animals illustrate the 
same kind of regulation in another form. 

In the case of man, at least, the creative character of the 
psychical activities scarcely needs specific illustration; the 
whole fabric of the civilization he has built up bears witness 
to it. Social organization, laws and government, the arts 
and sciences, have all sprung from a restless creative power 
which, even in the dullest of mankind, adds to the world some- 
thing that would not he there if that power had not been 
exercised. The whole meaning of education is missed, unless 
we think of it as a process in which this creative power is to 
be given the best possible chances of developing and express- 
ing itself. We need not dwell here upon a thought that will 
be with us throughout our inquiries. But before we pass on, 
it may be noted that both the extreme instances of " regula- 



28 EDUCATION: DATA AND FIRST PRINCIPLES 

tion " mentioned in the preceding paragraph have psychical 
parallels. The famous case of Helen Keller, blind, deaf 
and mute, yet a literary woman and a philosopher, is the 
capital instance to show how independent of circumstance the 
growth of intellect and character may be ; while regeneration 
is interestingly paralleled by the "re-education" that has 
restored in many a soldier the mind mutilated or deformed 
by shell-shock. 

We have next to bring out a most important feature which 
belongs to hormic processes of both kinds and of all levels — 
namely, their tendency to come together in such a way as to 
merge their separate identity in some hormic process of wider 
scope. Just as in an army or a Church there is a hierarchy of 
officers whose duties and powers are always, except in the 
highest, subordinate to those of a superior, so in the individual 
organism we constantly meet with hierarchies of hormic pro- 
cesses. Thus the reader's efEort to understand the present 
sentence is subordinate to the ampler hormic process which 
aims at grasping the argument of the chapter, this to the still 
more complex process whose end is the mastery of the 
book. The hierarchy possibly extends much higher still; 
for mastery of the theory of education may be an 
incident in the reader's training for his profession, and 
the training is in turn subordinate to a prolonged 
hormic process which will end only with his retirement 
from teaching. 

In this illustration each of the constituents of the hierarchy 
is, like the hierarchy as a whole, not only a hormic but also a 
conative process — that is, it is the expression of a conscious 
" drive " towards a consciously pursued end. It is, however, 
by no means necessary that the constituents of a conative 
complex should themselves be conative. Let us suppose that 
a man, wishing to call on a distant friend, rides to his destina- 
tion on a bicycle. The expedition as a whole is a conative 
process, and the act of cycling taken as a whole is also a cona- 



THE WILL TO LIVE 29 

tive process subordinate to the former. But the latter in- 
volves a great multiplicity of movements of limbs, and trunk, 
which are certainly not now conative processes, though they 
may have been so before the agent became an expert rider. 
Most of them are " automatic " processes, originally distinct 
and autonomous, which, as the cyclist acquired mastery of his 
art, became organized into a hormic system which works as a 
whole, and is ready as a whole to serve the interests of any 
higher system that calls for its collaboration. And in the 
complicated behaviour of those deeper parts of the organism 
that subserve digestion and respiration we have instances of 
hormic systems of an elaborate kind, in the organization and 
working of which consciousness plays as a rule no discernible 
part. 

We are now in a position to interpret man's life as a history 
in which two main movements are to be distinguished. One 
is a development in the character, or, as Professor Alexander 
is fond of saying, in the perfection, of his hormic processes : 
a development which carries them from the merely physio- 
logical level through the level of unconscious, or only dimly 
sentient, animality to the level of conscious conation. The 
other is a complementary development in which they become 
organized into ever wider and more complex hormic systems. 
Beginning as a cell in his mother's body, a very part of her 
flesh, he shortly becomes a " parasite " nourished by her blood 
and feeding on her food, yet already a being with a life and 
destiny of his own. The hormic processes, both conservative 
and creative, in which that life consists, are still mainly uncon- 
scious, though, as his nervous system determines and his sense 
organs form, his " will to live " may be enriched by some vague 
conational, that is conscious, elements, while he still lies in 
his mother's womb. As soon as he has left her body and has 
entered on the long task of picking his way through the 
labyrinth of the outer world, the conational elements acquire 
a new significance, and their development becomes the centre 



30 EDUCATION: DATA AND FIRST PRINCIPLES 

of the spectator's interest. Conation rises slowly from the 
level of blind or purblind impulse to that of clear-eyed desire, 
and eventually from the level of desire seeking an immediate 
good to that of will fixed upon a distant and perhaps ideal goal. 
Meanwhile, subserving this advance in the character of the 
horme, there is a parallel development in its organization — 
showing itself first in the emergence of his physiological organs 
and in the correlation of their functions, then, after birth, in 
the co-ordination of the powers of sense and movement in 
systems of ever-increasing complexity and effectiveness, and 
lastly in the gradual building up of great conative hierarchies 
which determine the form of the man's individuality and are 
the measure of his life's achievement. 

i ,,. The significance of this twofold development is, we repeat, 
itself twofold. On the one hand, it enables the growing child 
to face the world in more definite independence while entering 
into ever richer relations with it ; on the other hand (and the 
former purpose is doubtless subordinate to this), it enables him 
to express himself in activities that have an ever-increasing 
value. Education is concerned with both these aspects of the 
child's development, but, as we have already said, especially 
with the latter. That is, for instance, the meaning of the 
familiar statement that the main task of teaching is to create 
and cultivate " interests." There should be no need in this 
day to protect that statement against a once too common 
misunderstanding. It means not that the school should be 
made a place of pleasant entertainment, but that it is a place 
where the child should be tempted to throw himself into the 
worthiest forms of activity, and where the hormic systems 
which function in those activities should be firmly established 
in his nature against the day when he will be called upon to 
use them and develop them further in the greater world beyond 
school. 

Two more points must here be dealt with briefly to prepare 
the way for later discussions. The first is that as hormic 



THE WILL TO LIVE 31 

processes become organized into systems, the activities that 
spring from them become not only more complex but also 
more expressive. The italicized term can best be explained 
by examples. A good picture of a landscape has more 
expressiveness than the landscape itself, a better picture of it 
more expressiveness than one less good. Keats's ode to the 
nightingale is more expressive than the song of the bird, or than 
the emotions and thoughts it awakened in the poet before his 
creative labour began. The play of a trained cricketer is 
more expressive than the undisciplined smiting of the village 
batsman. In the same sense of the word, a child's interests 
and other forms of activity become, as they develop naturally, 
more expressive than the crude movements of mind and body 
from which they sprang. We return here to an idea we have 
already had before us : that the way of the artist shows in 
the clearest and most definite form what is fundamentally 
and ideally the way of all life. We draw and must 
constantly reinforce the corollary that the best way of 
education is the one in which this idea is most fruitfully 
applied. 

Secondly, we must note that recent psychological investi- 
gations, conducted by the method called "psycho-analysis," 
have thrown a flood of light upon the whole question of hormic 
organization. They have shown, on the one hand, how large 
a part is played in our conscious behaviour by hormic factors 
of which we may be at the time utterly unconscious — that is, 
that our conative processes are rarely purely conative, but 
almost always embrace important components belonging to 
the lower strata of our bafflingly complex organism. On the 
other hand, they have illuminated in a striking way the con- 
tinuity of our conative development, showing that the adult 
mind is, so to speak, but the visible surface of a living structure 
whose deeper layers are hormic elements dating from infancy 
or even beyond, and liable in certain circumstances still to 
break free from the systems into which they have become 



32 EDUCATION: DATA AND FIRST PRINCIPLES 

merged and to claim unfettered expression. But these are 
matters that had best be dealt with in the inquiry into the 
forms of mneme to which we now turn. 



NOTES ON BOOKS, ETC. 

J. S. Haldane, "Organism and Environment as illustrated by the 
Physiology of Breathing " (Oxford University Press, 1917). Also "The New 
Physiology" (Griffin, 1919). On the question of conation, the advanced 
student may study with profit S. Alexander, " Foundations and Sketch- 
Plan of a Conational Psychology" {British Journal of Psychology, vol. iv., 
pts. 3 and 4, December, 1911, Cambridge University Press). E. B. Holt, 
" The Freudian Wish " (Fisher Unwin, 1915), gives a lively and ultra-radical 
treatment of the same subject. The standard book of interest is John 
Adams' " The Herbartian Psychology Applied to Education" (Heath and 
Co.); the subject is also pleasantly treated in J. Welton, " The Psychology 
of Education" (Macmillan, 1911). 



CHAPTER IV 

THE LIVING PAST 

In the conscious life of man mneme is most clearly manifested 
in memory. In memory my own past still lives in me ; and not 
only my own, but also the past of men who died ages before 
my birth. And through the social memory we call history the 
past is incessantly shaping the present actions of men. There 
are, however, in our conscious life many instances of mnemic 
activity where the term "memory" cannot be applied without 
an inconveniently wide extension of its proper meaning. It 
would, for example, be a little violent to say that the reader 
" remembers " what words the several groups of letters in this 
sentence represent, or that he " remembers " what they mean. 
And he would certainly not tell an intimate friend, encountered 
in the street, that he " remembers " his face. Nor w^ould he 
say that the expert pianist " remembers " where to place his 
fingers as he plays a piece of music at sight. In all these cases 
memory once played its part, but that has long been super- 
seded as the basis of action. The agent now reacts immedi- 
ately upon the stimulus without any conscious reference to past 
experience; he " reads " the print, he " recognizes " or simply 
" sees " his friend, he plays the runs and chords ** automati- 
cally." When we extend our consideration to lower animals, 
the need of a wider notion than memory proper becomes still 
more evident. Horses and dogs, for example, learn a great 
deal both from instruction and from experience, but it is 
unlikely that conscious memory plays more than a very sub- 
ordinate part in their education- And when we descend to the 

33 3 



34 EDUCATION: DATA AND FIRST PRINCIPLES 

level of such creatures as the stentor the invocation of memory 
is quite out of the question. Yet, as we saw on pp. 15-16, 
the stentor, in its encounter with the stream of carmine, 
certainly behaved as if it remembered at one stage of the 
contest what had happened at previous stages. It is abun- 
dantly clear, then, that we need, merely to describe the overt 
behaviour of man and other animals, a term, such as mneme, 
which shall bear to memory in the proper sense the same 
relation as horme bears to conation — that is, a term referring 
to a general property of living organisms, of which conscious 
memory is only a special and occasional manifestation. 

In inquiring more closely how mneme operates, we may 
conveniently begin with an example drawn from the interest- 
ing pages of the biologist from whom the word has been bor- 
rowed. A young dog, happily ignorant as yet of human 
baseness, greets with friendly barking a gang of boys, who 
respond by pelting him with stones. Hurt and terrified, the 
puppy runs home, and for months or even years afterwards 
bolts with tail between legs at the sight of man or boy bending 
suddenly to the ground. 

To understand such a sequence of events it is clear that we 
must in the first place credit the dog with certain tendencies 
and capacities: the capacity to " perceive " and the tendency 
to be " interested in " the doings of a group of noisy young 
human beings, the tendency to bark half joyously and half 
defiantly at their clatter, the capacity to single out or discrimin- 
ate from the mass of their movements such acts as stooping 
and throwing, the capacity to feel pain and terror when the 
skin is violently struck, the tendency to flee when these feelings 
are powerfully evoked. These capacities and tendencies, 
together with a multitude of others, are the conditions which 
determine the way in which the puppy will react to the various 
situations he encounters. Using a convenient term of the 
psychologists, we may call their sum-total the animal's " dis- 
position "; and, since the point of the story we are analyzing 



THE LIVING PAST 35 

is that dispositions change as the result of " experience," 
we may distinguish the initial sum-total from the form it 
subsequently assumes, by naming it, in reference to what is to 
follow, the dog's " primary disposition. "^ There is no evidence 
that the dog, when once safely home, ever remembers or 
thinks about his misadventure, yet we find that if, long after- 
wards, a stranger should, in his presence, suddenly stoop to 
pick up an object from the ground, or to adjust a shoe-lace, 
the animal may bolt incontinently from the spot, just as if he 
had not only perceived the movement, but had also received 
a blow from a missile. It is evident, therefore, that his 
" primary disposition " has suffered a change to a " secondary 
disposition," which only awaited the appropriate occasion 
to be revealed in a novel form of reaction. The question is 
how we are to conceive of the change. The obvious reply is 
that the dog's experience has left traces, or as Semon terms 
them, *' engrams " (" imprints ") upon the primary disposi- 
tion, and that the change is due to these. But if we are to 
understand the matter thoroughly the reply must go farther 
than this. We must suppose not only that, on the day of 
trouble, the perception of stone-throwing, the feeling of a blow, 
and the experience of flight urged by pain and terror were for 
the first time brought together in the dog's history, but that 
he somehow experienced these things as belonging together. 
Of his capacity to experience such things as " belonging to- 
gether " we can say only that it is a special case of the organ- 
ism's general power to create unity in diversity. We must, 
however, further suppose that, as the correlative of that capa- 
city, the several engrams which correspond to the several 
items of the original "excitement-complex" — i.e., the per- 
ception of stooping, the pain, the feelings of the terrified flight 
and the rest — do not simply lie side by side in the animal's 

^ Seinoa's term is " primaror IndifEerenzzustand," the word "indiffer- 
ence" referring, of course, to the fact that the animal has as yet not learnt 
to react to movements suggestive of stone-throwing in the way he does after 
his experience of their painful consequences. 



36 EDUCATION: DATA AND FIRST PRINCIPLES 

disposition, but are deposited therein as an organized " engram- 
complex," forming henceforward part of the structure of his 
secondary disposition and having a definite though subordinate 
unity of its own. And it is the result of this organization that, 
when one of the original excitements recurs — namely, the 
perception of a boy or a man stooping to the ground — the 
engram-complex as a whole is reawakened into activity, and 
the animal behaves as if the whole of the original situation 
were reconstituted. 

It seems possible to interpret in terms of engram- 
complexes phenomena of " learning by experience " and of 
" coherent progressiveness and adaptiveness " that occur in a 
myriad forms in the behaviour of animals from the lowest up 
to man. It is important to realize how varied, as well as 
numerous, those forms may be. In the first place, it is by no 
means necessary that the stimuli which give rise to an engram- 
complex should be simultaneous; they are at least as often 
successive. The power to recite a poem or to play from 
memory a piece of music implies an engram-complex of the 
latter kind, so organized that each word or chord, when 
uttered or played, brings about the repetition of the next 
and of the subsequent words or chords. The same thing must 
be true of habitual actions, such as dressing and undressing, 
unlocking familiar doors, and the like, and of the acquired 
ways and tricks of domestic and wild animals; in none of 
which does conscious memory play a conspicuous part, even 
if it is present at all. 

In the second place, the components of an engram-com- 
plex may be derived from widely different strata of the organ- 
ism's nature. An experiment by the physiologist Pavlov 
illustrates efiectively this important principle. Pavlov made 
a strict point of giving a dog food exactly two minutes after 
ringing a bell. When the dog was habituated to this pro- 
cedure, he occasionally rang the bell without offering food or 
allowing it to be seen. Nevertheless, saliva was on these 



THE LIVING PAST 37 

occasions copiously secreted in the animal's mouth precisely 
two minutes after the accustomed signal. The physiologist 
cannot tell us in detail what happens during such a period 
of two minutes ; but it is clearly to be regarded as the unfold- 
ing of an engram-complex which, though it includes in its 
scheme widely diverse functions, conscious and unconscious, 
is yet capable of being " released " by the action of a single 
stimulus — the sound of the bell. 

The student will find no difficulty in applying similar ex- 
planations to numerous phenomena of daily occurrence — 
such as the physiological rhythms connected with the diges- 
tive functions, and with sleep. It is more interesting still to 
see how they may be invoked to illuminate the mysteries of 
growth and inheritance. To understand these — so far as 
understanding is at present possible — we must, in the first 
place, grasp the fact that the fertilized germ-cell is not some- 
thing that precedes the organism, but is the organism itself 
in its earliest stage. We are then ready to think of it as pos- 
sessing a disposition — the " primary " disposition of the 
organism in a special sense — which is already charged with 
engrams derived from the life of its ancestors. From this 
point of vieAv the physical growth of a creature from germ-cell 
to the adult form is seen as a process entirely homologous 
with the recitation of a poem or the playing of a musical 
composition from memory. Apart from the circumstance 
(in a sense accidental) that reciting and playing are conscious 
while growth is unconscious, the only substantial difference 
between the two kinds of process lies in the fact that the 
mnemic basis of the former was acquired during the life of 
the individual, while bodily growth reveals an engram-complex 
that was established far back in the individual's ancestry. 
We must suppose that the stimulus which provokes the first 
division of the ovum into two cells acts on the inherited com- 
plex in much the same way as the opening words of the poem 
or notes of the music act upon the acquired complex. Thus 



38 EDUCATION: DATA AND FIRST PETNCIPLES 

each engram in the series announces in due course its 
presence in the disposition until at length the whole 
of the ancient scheme of development is once more 
reasserted. 

We may see the same mnemic principle at work in the 
instincts of animals — and here conscious as well as unconscious 
acts are involved in the reaflS.rmation of the inherited rhythm. 
As an illustration we take one of Semon's examples : the nest- 
building instinct in birds. Nest-building is, of course, the 
expression of an " urge " subsidiary to the hormic process 
whose end is the procreation and nurture of the next genera- 
tion. That great hormic process is initiated, in all animals 
above the lowest, by definite changes in the structure and 
functioning of the reproductive organs — changes that are 
themselves incidents in the repetition of the mnemic rhythm 
of life. At a certain stage in its development, the sight of the 
proper kind of materials acts as a stimulus, releasing a mar- 
vellously complex train of activities that ends only with the 
completion of a nest, often of a highly elaborate and character- 
istic pattern. The mated birds behave, in fact, as though 
they remembered and sought deliberately to reproduce a 
structural plan firmly established in the tradition of their 
race. Yet neither of them may ever have seen that plan 
exemplified. 

Man shows no such unmistakable instances of racial mneme 
exhibited on the conscious as well as on the merely bodily 
level; nevertheless, unprejudiced observation finds sufficiently 
clear traces of it running everywhere through the tissue of his 
life. It is a trite remark that " as soon as a wife becomes a 
mother her whole thought and feeling, her whole being, is 
altered," and no one shrinks from referring her behaviour, 
even in its highest spiritual manifestations, to " maternal 
instinct," that is to racial mneme, as its basis. Many writers 
have ascribed a mnemic origin to certain characteristics of 
mythology and folklore that are found among men of all 



THE LIVING PAST 39 

races, and appear in varied but allied forms at all periods of 
history. It is even suggested with some plausibility that 
certain common features of our dreams may be, so to speak, 
revivals of the waking thoughts of our remote forefathers; 
that they are racial reminiscences which, excluded from 
waking consciousness by the conditions of modern life, assert 
their continued existence by weaving themselves into the 
visions of the night. 

It is more germane to our purpose to note that the same 
notion of racial mneme is the basis of a theory which, though 
it is sometimes pressed to extravagant lengths, has consider- 
able validity as an educational principle. That is the theory 
that the mental development of the individual '* recapitu- 
lates " the mental history of the race. Professor Stanley 
Hall, a leading exponent of the view, exemplifies it when he 
bids us see in our little civilized barbarians between the ages 
of eight and twelve, with their stable bodily form and obstinate 
good health, and their curious passion for independent life, 
a clear reaffirmation of a pigmoid stage in human evolution, 
which still has representatives in the Bushmen and the little 
people of the Congo forests. In the same spirit Professor 
Carveth Read, an eminently cautious thinker, finds " re- 
capitulation," not only in the way in which the speech of 
children, like that of the infra-human hunting pack from 
which he assumes mankind to be derived, " emerges from 
emotional noises and impulsive babbling, assisted by gesture," 
and in their early awakened appetite for private property, 
but also in the passion which from about the sixth year is 
directed towards the building of " houses," showing a strong 
family likeness to the tree-shelters of anthropoid apes, and 
towards the making of primitive tools. He even suggests 
that by observation of children we may efEect a tentative 
reconstruction of the lost series of events which made up 
the early history of man's emergence from the beast, 
and of his long struggle towards the possession of 



40 EDUCATION: DATA AND FIRST PRINCIPLES 

language, customs, myths, reasoning power and humane 
sentiments.^ 

Before closing this chapter it is proper to make a brief 
reference to views, supported by the authority of eminent 
names, which make a radical distinction among the mnemic 
phenomena that we have tried to reduce to a single principle. 
M. Henri Bergson has maintained that there is a fundamental 
difference between what he regards as true memory and 
the so-called " mechanical association " with which we have 
confounded it. Professor Wildon Carr has illustrated Berg- 
son's distinction by the difference between an auditor's 
memory of the performance of a piece of music and the " motor 
mechanisms "that enabled the pianist to play it. Dr. William 
McDougall has contrasted, for the same purpose, the ease and 
perfection with which his child of six recalled past scenes 
and events and the slowness and difficulty with which the 
same child learned to name the letters of the alphabet. Berg- 
son and McDougall do not explain these differences in the 
same way, but their interpretations agree in spirit. Accord- 
ing to both, mechanical association is an affair of the body, 
chiefly of the nervous system, while true memory is an activity 
of a spiritual force or entity that uses the bodily mechanism 
for its purposes. In short, mechanical association belongs to 
the " corpse," true memory to the " ghost in the corpse." 

To combat this contention in detail would delay us too 
long. We must be content to point out that Bergson and 
McDougall seem to have surrendered to the mechanists so far 
as the body is concerned, and seek to redress the situation by 
invoking the mysterious aid of a deus in machina. Unless 
they are also prepared, which they are not, to accept the 
Cartesian paradox that all animals but man are soulless, they 
must either refer the phenomena of " true memory " (includ- 
ing, in McDougall's case, the very numerous phenomena called 

•■ See his article in the British Journal of Psychology, vol. viii., pt. 4, 
June, 1917. 



THE LIVING PAST 41 

" recognition of meaning ") to the operation of a spiritual 
world-entity which uses all animal bodies as its instruments 
of expression, or suppose each macJiina in which they appear 
to have its own deus. It is roughly just, if summary, to say 
that Professor Bergson adopts the former alternative, Dr. 
McDougall the second. Wc can only reassert our preference 
for the view which regards no bodily phenomena as purely 
mechanical, and sees in the phenomena of conscious life but 
the highest manifestation of properties that permeate all 
organisms through and through. 

NOTES ON BOOKS, ETC. 

The references to Semon are drawn from his book, " Die Mneme als 
erhaltendes Prinzip" (Leipzig, Engelinann, 3rd ed.. 1911; pp. 420). The 
book is well analyzed and criticized by Marcus M. Haetog, " Problems of 
Life and Reproduction" (John Murray, 1913). For the theory of re- 
capitulation sec Stanley Hall, "Adolescence" (2 vols., Appleton, 1904). 
Bergson's views on memory are set out in his "Matter and Momoiy," 
especially Chapter III., and are admirably expounded in Wildon Caee, 
" The Philosophy of Change " (Macmillan, 1914). McLougall's view? fue 
given in his deeply interesting "Body and Mind" (Methuen, 1911). For 
the laws of mechanical association, see H. J. Watt's useful little book, 
" The Economy and Training of Memory " (Edward Arnold, 1909). 



CHAPTER V 

THE RELATIONS BETWEEN HORME AND MNEME 

We have separated horme and mneme for corkvenience of 
discussion, but it must always be remembered that the terms 
are only names for aspects of the organism's activities, and 
that the features to which they refer are, in historical fact, 
never separated. Every act of self-assertion is both hormic 
and mnemic : hormic in so far as it is an instance of the con- 
servative or creative activity which is the essence of life, 
mnemic in so far as its form is at least partly shaped by the 
organism's individual or racial history. In other words, 
engram-complexes are not to be thought of as dead deposits 
in the organism, or as possible materials of which the organism's 
creative activity makes use, but are living parts of the dis- 
position from which all the animal's activity flows; or, to 
put the same idea differently, are the vehicles in which the 
conservative and creative functions appear and are exercised. 
This very important truth is involved in the familiar 
observation that progress in art and invention, in science and 
philosophy, in politics and social life, and (we may add) in 
morals and religion, is never an advance from something wholly 
discarded to something wholly new. The stepping stones 
on which men and societies rise to higher things are never 
their dead selves, but their mnemic selves, alive and actively 
growing. The reader is advised, especially if he is a teacher, 
to gain as vivid an idea as possible of this activity of the 
"living past" by studying it in the history of some im- 
portant department of human progress. 

42 



RELATIONS BETWEEN HORME AND MNEME 43 

He should also learn to recognize the omnipresence of the 

same principle in e very-day activities. Take as an example 

the writing of a letter. It is obvious that the impulse to use 

this highly artificial mode of communication is mnemic, as 

well as the command of words and their meanings, of spelling, 

and of pen-movements that is needed for its fulfilment. 

Moreover, the specific situation out of which the impulse — 

the horme — arises must also be largely mnemic in character, 

for the writer's purpose must be to congratulate, to apologize, 

to persuade, to express love or anger, or to perform some 

other act of a recognized type. This mnemic mass is the 

matrix in which horme stirs and out of which it emerges, 

taking definite shape and content as it proceeds. Thus the 

writer's confidence that he " knows what he is going to say " 

does not imply that he knows beforehand what words he is 

about to set down. It is an excitement awakened by a 

situation which, though partly new, is also partly old — an 

excitement felt already to be spreading to the engrams 

(engrams of ideas, words, turns of expression, and so forth), 

whose activities must be drawn into its sphere if it is to be 

an adequate vehicle of self-assertion in face of the novel as 

well as the familiar elements of that situation. The same 

general account may evidently be given of the genesis of a 

poem, of a piece of music, or of the solution of any theoretical 

or practical problem. Nor does it hold good only of elaborate 

activities such as these; it is equally true (for example) of 

every act of verbal expression that goes beyond the bare 

repetition of a conventional formula. Thus any conversation 

that is more than a mere exchange of commonplaces has 

necessarily an element of adventure; for no speaker who has 

once embarked upon a sentence can foresee precisely where 

it will carry him. All that can be said with certainty is : 

(i.) that the utterance must originate in the excitement, at 

once hormic and mnemic, of some specific complex; (ii.) 

that this complex governs its course from beginning to 



44 EDUCATION: DATA AND FIRST PRINCIPLES 

end;^ and (iii.) that the complex does not remain unchanged 
during the utterance, but is modified and enriched by the 
products of its own creative activity in such a way that it 
often becomes a substantially new thing, fitted to be the 
starting-point of a fresh movement of self-assertion. 

This directive influence of the cngram-complex is called 
by psychologists its " determining tendency," and has been 
studied experimentally in simple cases. Let the reader utter 
or exhibit to another person (the " subject ") a word chosen 
at random, having previously instructed the subject to reply 
with the first word that comes into his mind. In this case — 
technically known as the case of " free association " — it is 
impossible to foresee what kind of " reaction " the " stimulus- 
word " will provoke, for the mental movement is at liberty 
to take any one of an indefinite number of possible directions. 
But now let the experimenter announce that the stimulus- 
word will be the name of a class, and that the reaction is to 
be the name of some specimen of that class; then the re- 
sult will be quite different. For the association that supplies 
the reaction is no longer " free " ; it is " constrained " — that is, 
guided by a definite " determining tendency." If, for instance, 
the stimulus- word is " animal," the reaction will be some 
such word as " dog " ; if " coin," some such word as " penny," 
and so on. 

It is important to realize what happens here. The sub- 
ject's memory does not throw up a number of suggestions from 
which a suitable reaction- word is consciously selected; it 
gives him immediately a word of the required character. Such 
a result cannot be explained, except on the assumption that 
the determining tendency is the hormic action of a complex 
whose excitement induces the activity only of engrams con- 
gruent with itself. We may, in fact, regard these experi- 

^ The plight of the nervous public speaker -who " lotes the thread cf his 
sentence" is clue, of course, to a failure of the engrani-ccniplex to letain 
its command of the activity. 



RELATIONS BETWEEN HORME AND MNEME 45 

ments on constrained association as simplified models of what 
takes place in all originating activity, whether it be shown 
in thought, in invention and imagination, or in every-day 
phenomena of action and will. 

Before passing on we must emphasize another aspect of the 
relations between horme and mneme. We all know that 
memory is apt to prove treacherous, not only in what it lets 
slide, but also in what it retains. For instance, an exciting 
incident we may have witnessed is often strangely translated 
in our subsequent account of it. This is notably the case if 
we ourselves played in the events a part not so satisfactory 
as we might have wished ; we are then apt, however innocently 
and unconsciously, to mould them nearer to the heart's 
desire. Children exhibit this familiar tendency in a specially 
striking way, and are liable, as R. L. Stevenson has pointed 
out, to suffer unjust censure on account of it. 

Phenomena of this kind not only show that memory and 
imagination have a common origin and are always closely 
allied; they also exemplify well a more general principle — ■ 
namely, that the mnemic basis of our actions tends constantly 
to be modified in such a way as to make self-assertion more 
effective and (so to speak) more shapely — in a word, more 
expressive.! Thus in the process of attaining to automatism 
in such actions as writing, playing a musical instrument, 
dancing, and the use of tools, a number of superfluous and 
clumsy movements are always eliminated, so that the activity 
which issues from the final engram-complexes is much more 
economical, graceful and efficient than it was at first, and 
may acquire these qualities in the highest degree. 

A well-known experiment by Thorndike illustrates the same 
principle at work on a lower level. Hungry cats were shut 
up in cages from which they could escape only if, by happy 
accident, they pulled the cord, lifted the latch or turned the 
button that opened the door. If a cat once succeeded, by a 

1 See p. 31. 



46 EDUOATION: DATA AND FIRST PRINCIPLES 

lucky sequence of random movements, in escaping and reach- 
ing the food exposed outside the cage, it generally released 
itself much more quickly on subsequent occasions, and might, 
in favourable cases, soon learn to do so immediately. We 
must suppose that in such cases the animal's success tended 
to consolidate the mnemic basis of its movements into a 
definite complex from which the engrams connected with 
irrelevant actions were excluded. That is to say, successful 
self-assertion, in animals as in men, tends to modify its mnemic 
basis in a direction favourable to still more secure and facile 
expression. 

An interesting feature in the processes just described is the 
way in which an engram-complex often becomes " consoli- 
dated " during intervals of rest from the performance it 
underlies. As William James says, " we learn to swim in 
winter and to skate in summer." The reader has, perhaps, 
himself observed instances in which skilled acts, not yet per- 
fectly automatic, are performed better immediately after 
than they were before an interval of abstention from practice.^ 

Some recent experiments by Dr. P. B. Ballard illustrate 
beautifully the same phenomenon in verbal memory. Ballard 
found that when a piece of poetry is learnt by heart, the amount 
available for recall, instead of being greatest immediately 
after the learning, may increase for several days — some words 
and phrases originally remembered being lost but replaced 
by a greater number that emerge after the interval. This 
"reminiscence" is very notable in young- children, but 
diminishes in amount as they grow older. In adults it 
appears to be almost negligible.^ 

The facts of consolidation form a natural transition to the 
next point of our discussion . They suggest that a determining 

^ Such observations have an obvious bearing on teaching methods. 

^ See Ballard, "Reminiscence and Obliviscence," Monograph Sujjplement 
of tlie Brit. Journ. of Pnycli., No. 2, 191.5. The present author formerly 
possessed in a considerable degree the, power of recovering after an interval 
a melody once heard but not then remembered. He finds that ho has now 
lost it almost entirely. 



RELATIONS BETWEEN HORME AND MNEME 47 

tendency, after it has ceased to occupy consciousness, may 
still pursue its work in the darkness of unconsciousness. This 
interpretation is strongly supported by the common observa- 
tion that if we " sleep over " a difficult problem, we often find 
the solution in our hands when we return to it in the morning. 
And every one must have noticed how frequently things that 
memory has sought in vain to recall may at a later moment 
" saunter into the mind, " as James says, casually and 
irrelevantly, " just as if they had never been sent for." 

Occurrences of this kind prompt the question whether 
association is ever really " free," and whether the "accidental " 
emergence of thoughts and words into consciousness is not 
always due to the action of determining tendencies — that is, 
of engram-complexes — " working in the darkness." That, 
in a great number of instances, this is the case has been proved 
by the insight and patient labours of Professor S. Freud of 
Vienna and Dr. Carl Jung of Ziirich, whose discoveries have 
opened up a most important field — perhaps the most important 
— in modern psychology. 

The reader must understand clearly what is the point at 
issue. It has long been a psychological commonplace that 
the course taken by thought and memory is normally^ deter- 
mined by certain " laws of association." The question raised 
by Freud and Jung concerns the nature of those laws . Accord- 
ing to the older view, association is a purely mnemic pheno- 
menon, depending entirely upon such " mechanical " factors 
as the frequency and recency of the connections in 
experience between the things associated. According to 
the newer view (which will be seen to be consonant with 
the ideas developed in this book), it is essentially hormic as 
well as mnemic. That is to say, the course of thought and 
memory is largely determined by active complexes, whose 

* "Normally," because it has commonly been assumed, explicitly or 
implicitly, that in insanity and in the " irrational " behaviour of neurotics 
the ordinary laws of association in some mysterious way break down. 



48 EDUCATION: DATA AND FIRST PRINCIPLES 

influence depends not so much upon whether they have been 
frequently or recently excited as upon the part they have 
played in the subject's hormic history. If a complex has been 
an important vehicle of self-assertion — and especially if its 
activity has been markedly pleasurable or unpleasant — it 
will insinuate its influence into the current of thoughts and 
memories as mysteriously and irresistibly as King Charles's 
head forced itself into Mr. Dick's memorial.^ 

By examining a subject's reactions to a carefully chosen 
series of stimulus- words, a skilled experimenter can generally 
bring to light those engram-complexes in the subject's dis- 
position which have or have had most significance for his self- 
assertion. Sometimes the complexes disclosed by this 
' ' psycho-analysis ' ' occasion the subj ect no surprise ; sometimes, 
on the other hand, he has not the least idea of the degree to 
which they dominate his mental life — or even, of their exist- 
ence. For example, when one of Jung's patients reacted 
both frequently and (often) irrelevantly with the word 
" short," he was merely revealing unintentionally the annoy- 
ance he had consciously suffered for years on the score of his 
diminutive stature. But when a friend of the author found 
that his free associations, if followed up, nearly always led to 
topics connected with his professional occupation, he was 
astonished and somewhat concerned; for he was a recent 
and devoted husband. The results of his psycho-analysis 
do not, however, prove that he nourished, unknown to himself, 
a coldness towards his wife ; they simply illustrate the dominat- 
ing influence of complexes which had for years been the main 
channels of his self-assertion. A striking literary instance of 
the self-revelation sometimes brought about by reaction to 
" stimulus- words " is Emma Woodhouse's sudden discovery of 
her attitude towards Mr. Knightley, provoked by a critical con- 
versation with her friend Harriet Smith. The candid reader 

^ This is not merely an analogue; it is rather an examj)le of the action 
of a peculiarly insistent complex. 



RELATIONS BETWEEN HORME AND MNEME 49 

will probably confess to similar events, trivial or serious, in 
his own experience, " Sudden conversions " and a host of 
analogous incidents are phenomena of essentially the same 
kind. 

More important still than the positive influence of buried 
complexes is their negative influence in excluding ideas and 
recollections from consciousness . If a sub j ect is flustered by a 
stimulus-word, or takes an unusually long time in reacting 
to it, it is generally safe to deduce that the word has impinged 
upon a complex whose conscious activity would be painful. 
The complex may lie on the " fore-conscious " level— that is, 
the ideas belonging to its activity, though forgotten, may be 
capable of being recalled by the subject. But in other cases 
it may be buried so deep that only ruthless and long-continued 
psycho-analysis can bring it to light. In such cases it is 
always found to be derived from painful experiences or un- 
pleasant impressions deliberately expelled from the mind, or 
to be connected with directions of self-assertion from which 
the subject, in his development, has more or less violently 
broken away. 

The phenomenon here in view is described by the technical 
term " repression." Ordinary forgetfulness is, without doubt, 
often due to repression — that is, to the fact that, unconsciously, 
one wants to forget.^ The letter which I persistently forget 
to write, or, after I have written it, to post, is frequently a 
disagreeable one; the family to whom I have inexplicably 
omitted to send my usual Christmas greetings turns out to 
have a name similar to that of an intimate friend, recently 
lost; and so on. Chronic as well as occasional lapses of 
memory come under this explanation. It has been suggested,^ 
for example, that inability to remember personal names may 
often be due to the circumstance that one's own name, being 

^ Dr. Ernest Jones boldly maintains that all forgetfulness is due to this 
jause. See his paper in Brit. Journ. of Psych., vol. viii., pt. i. 

2 By Dr. Ernest Jones, who, following his master, Freud, haa written 
on the whole subject very brilliantly. 

4 



50 EDUCATION: DATA AND FIRST PRINCIPLES 

either odd or extremely common, is offensive to one's self- 
esteem. And a host of blunders and mistakes — such as slips 
of tongue and pen, misprints, the mislaying of objects, false 
recognition of persons and things — may similarly be attributed 
to the influence of repressed complexes. 

In the foregoing instances the buried complex exercises 
direct influence, positive or negative, upon thought or action. 
In other cases its influence may be disguised by the fact that 
it merges its activities in those of other complexes which have 
retained the right of admission to consciousness. The ex- 
pression of the buried complex is in these cases not direct but 
symholic. Oddities of manner, spasmodic grimaces, and queer 
habits (such as Dr. Johnson's trick of touching every lamp- 
post), often have their explanation here ; meaningless in them- 
selves, they can be shown by psycho-analysis to be perfectly 
intelligible as symbols by which some inarticulate complex 
is striving to express itself. Thus an epidemic of breakages 
in the kitchen may symbolize the maid-servant's antipathy to 
a scolding mistiess. The virtuous maid may be unaware of 
the depth of her resentment, and may seek, quite honestly, 
to " rationalize "the " accidents " by attributing them in good 
faith to the coldness of her hands or the hotness of the water, 
or by invoking some other plausible excuse. 

There are few of us whose daily thoughts and conduct 
do not offer to the psycho-analyst material of this character. 
And, as Freud has shown, there is one region of the mental 
life of every one where the symbolic activity of buried com- 
plexes is not an exceptional incident but an essential and uni- 
versal feature — namely, the region occupied by dreams. 
Dreams, to use Mr. Maurice Nicoll's apt image, are cartoons ; 
and in them the skilled interpreter may often ** read strange 
matters. ' ' That is why they are now so industriously studied 
by those whose business is to minister to minds diseased. 

There is an interesting and important difference in the 
attitude of Freud and Jung towards dreams. According to 



RELATIONS BETWEEN HORME AND MNEME 51 

Freud, a dream always harks back to repressed, and therefore 
unfulfilled desires of childhood. He holds, then, that its 
" manifest content " must invariably be interpreted as the 
disguise assumed by a ** latent " infantile wish seeking 
symbolic satisfaction in the dream-phantasy. Jung accepts 
the distinction between the " manifest " and the " latent " 
content of dreams, and recognizes the influence of forgotten 
incidents of childhood. But for him the dream, though 
necessarily rooted in the past, is essentially a forward-directed 
activity. It embodies symbolically a protest or warning of 
the organism as a whole against the unhealthily restricted 
range or the dangerous course of its own conscious activities. ^ 
Both theories have, probably, their special spheres of useful- 
ness, but the reader will observe that Jung's view brings the 
dream into line with the general doctrine of self-maintenance 
sketched in Chap. III. and with what was said about the 
functions of engram-complexes earlier in the present 
chapter. 

A case recently described by Dr. W. H. R. Rivers^ illus- 
trates very clearly the value of dreams in the diagnosis and 
treatment of mental troubles. The subject was an officer in 
the R.A.M.C. who was a victim to claustrophobia — that is, to 
an unreasoning dread of being in an enclosed space, especially 
if he could not escape from it. He had sufEered from this 
painful fear since boyhood, but never discovered it to be 
abnormal until, on joining the Army in France, he observed 
that other men could live comfortably in the trenches and 
dug-outs in circumstances so intolerable to himself that his 
health completely broke down under them. When he came 
into Dr. Rivers' hands he was instructed to record his dreams 
and, in particular, to follow up the memories that came into 
his mind while thinking over them immediately on waking. 

^ This view is expounded at length in Mr. NicolFs book and is excel- 
lently illustrated, with special reference to education, in Dr. Constance 
Long's article in the Jovrn. of Ex per. Pisda'jrxjy for June, 1917. 

a lu The Lancet for August 18, 1917. 



52 EDUCATION: DATA AND FIRST PRINCIPLES 

In this way he eventually recovered the long-forgotten in- 
cident that was the origin of his trouble. It seems that when 
three or four years of age he had taken an article for sale to a 
rag and bone merchant, whose dwelling was reached by a long 
and dark passage, and that on returning with the halfpenny 
earned by his enterprise he found the door of the passage 
shut. He was too small to open it, and in the darkness a 
dog began to growl, causing him the extreme of terror. 

The subsequent verification of some of the forgotten 
circumstances recalled in this dream placed it beyond doubt 
the engram-complex was here revealed whose subterranean 
activity had played so baleful a part in the patient's life. 
We need add to the story only one more item, but one of 
extreme importance. As soon as the origin of the patient's 
irrational terrors was disclosed they ceased to plague him. 
He was able for the first time to sit in a theatre and to travel 
in a tube railway train with comfort. Thus was illustrated one 
of the tenets of the Freudian doctrine — namely, that a repressed 
complex, when once the resistances which kept it submerged 
are broken down, generally loses its nocuous power.^ 

There can be no doubt that the evidence summarized in 
this chapter both confirms and enriches the general view of 
the organism which we adopted at the outset. In particular 
it tends to correct common errors and prejudices with respect 
to the significance of consciousness in human behaviour. 

^ Dr. Rivors at first hesitated to subseribe to this view, thinking i( 
possible tiiat the alleged "cathartic" effect of psycho-analysis may really 
be due to suggestion: for the patient has been made to believe that when (lie 
complex is discovered he will be cured. He ap[)ear3 to have become latei 
more friendly to the orthodox view. It is more important to record EJvcrs's 
conviction that his experiences with shell-shocked soldiers definitely refute 
the Freudian dogma that all repressed complexes originate in infantile 
sexuality. The origin of Freud's belief is, be holds, to be found in the fact 
that the wide range of impulses covered by the term "sexual" in the 
Freudian school are those which are most commonly suppressed in the con- 
ditions of peaceful civilized life. In war the soldier is called upon to sup- 
press impulses belonging to an equally primitive and powerful set of ten- 
dencies — namely, those connected with fear. It is interesting to note that, 
the patient whose case is described in the text was treated unsucccssfullyj 
by Freud before the war. 



RELATIONS BETWEEN HORME AND MNEME 53 

Consciousness is, as we have said, the form in which self- 
assertion, whether conservative or creative, reaches the highest 
level of perfection as yet exhibited in animate creatures. 
As such it has a significance and a value which it would be 
perverse to depreciate. Nevertheless, it is, from the biological 
standpoint, only one of the organism's means of conducting 
that intercourse with the environment by which and in which 
it lives. Consciousness marks the growing-point of our higher 
activities, the edge by which they " cut into reality." Behind 
this point, this edge, there is a vast hormic organization of 
which a great part is never represented directly in conscious- 
ness, while, of the residue, much that has once been conscious 
can never normally and in its own character reach the con- 
scious level again. Nevertheless, the movements of con- 
sciousness, subserving the organism's perpetual self-assertion, 
are never wholly explicable apart from this organization, 
whose history and constitution they express in an infinite 
variety of subtle ways. 

We have already referred (at the end of Chap. III.) to the 
influence of early-formed complexes upon the ultimate fashion 
of a man's individuality. So far as this influence is expressed 
in "habit " we need not discuss it; for William James has 
preached upon that subject what has been called the finest 
psychological sermon in any language,^ and we will not essay 
the hopeless task of improving on him. Recent research, 
particularly by the psycho-analysts, has, however, thrown 
into relief certain related phenomena, whose educational 
importance is so great that some consideration must be given 
to them. 

Dr. Ernest Jones observes that he has succeeded by psycho- 
analysis in tracing back the impulses that led many of his 
patients to enter upon their professions or occupations to 
repressed infantile interests directed towards anti-social con- 



ch 



1 It will be found in chap. iv. of the "Principles of Psychology " and in 
viii. of " Talks to Teachers." 



54 EDUCATION: DATA AND FIRST PRINCIPLES 

duct or unseemly objects. His cases cover a wide range, for 
they include a well-known constructor of canals and bridges, 
an architect, a sculptor, a type-moulder, and a chef. He 
admits that other factors besides the unconscious agents he 
has in view helped to determine the choice of occupation in 
these cases, but maintains that " external inducements and 
opportunities . , . important as they may seem to the 
casual observer, are often but the pretext for the expression 
of some submerged primary craving." : 

There can be little doubt that unconscious factors of this 
kind have, as Dr. Jones says, remarkable tenacity, vigour 
and durability, and that they control the direction of adult 
interest to a degree that is very insufficiently appreciated. 
The most important thing to note is the way in which the 
energy belonging to these persistent impulses may be trans- 
ferred, as in the cases mentioned by Jones, from their primary 
and generally undesirable fields of interest, to others of unim- 
peachable character and often of high value. This transfer- 
ence is called " sublimation," and is justly regarded by 
Freudian writers as a process deserving the careful attention 
of all who have to do with the upbringing of children. Sub- 
limation, it should be understood, does not mean the mere 
shifting of a stream of general energy from one direction 
to another — as when a young man transfers to war or finance 
the energy he has hitherto wasted on " the little emptiness of 
love." It is the recomposition into a new hierarchy of definite 
hormic factors — Dr. Jones calls them" biological components " 
— of which each bears its own specific energy and carries that 
energy with it into the worthier complex. The teacher who 
has the insight to detect the unsatisfied hormic factors beneath 
the surface of a child's or a youth's conscious life, and can con- 
trive to draft them into worthy and satisfying modes of self- 
assertion, may often save for society a useful and vigorous in- 
dividuality that would otherwise be lost. This is, we may 
remark, the secret of the success in reclaiming " young de- 



RELATIONS BETWEEN HORME AND MNEME 55 

linquents " that was attained in the Little Commonwealth, 
whose superintendent, Mr. Homer Lane, has traced with 
profound psychological insight the steps by which the uncom- 
pensated repression of natural impulses in childhood often 
leads to social outlawry in adult life.^ It is, in fact, unques- 
tionable that the records of psycho- analysis greatly strengthen 
the argument for making the autonomous development of the 
individual the central aim of education. They reveal in 
what dim depths the foundations of individuality are laid, 
how endlessly varied are its natural forms, and how disastrous 
it may sometimes be to force upon the growing character a 
form discordant with its principle of unity. 

If it be asked why this truth has so long been ignored 
and is still so rarely recognized, the answer is that, in ordinary 
cases, the sublimation of the rebellious or undesirable impulses 
of childhood takes place without difficulty under the normal 
conditions of home and school life. The child grows simply 
and easily into one of the stock patterns of humanity. On 
the other hand, every school has its problems in the form of 
boys or girls who ** get across " their teachers or their fellows, 
and are obstinately unresponsive to instruction or in other 
ways out of touch with the influences of the school society. 
The short way of dealing with these divergents — the process 
called " licking them into shape " — has rarely more than a 
superficial success and often produces lasting harm; for it 
touches only the symptoms, not the causes of the trouble. 
The causes are, more often than we suppose, deep-seated 
impulses which have not found healthy modes of expression, 
and, their cruder manifestations being necessarily suppressed, 
sometimes prompt the child to rebellious outbursts incom- 
prehensible even to himself, sometimes make him unteachable 
or " unclubable." In extreme instances the effect of re- 
pressed and unsublimated impulses may even be to isolate a 

1 See, for example, his article on "The Faults and Misdemeanours of 
Caildrea ' in the " Report of the Conference on New Ideals in Education ' ' 
for I'Jlo (published by the Secretary, 24, Royal Avenue, Chelsea, S.W.). 



56 EDUCATION: DATA AND FIRST PRINCIPLES 

child for all practical purposes from the life of his fellows. 
An instance of this kind has been described to the writer by 
a highly competent observer — namely, the case of an elemen- 
tary school girl who, at the age of thirteen, had learnt neither 
to read nor to write, and had never been known to speak 
voluntarily at school, but who, when removed to an environ- 
ment where free eiqpansion was permitted, revealed intellectual 
ability far above the average and rapidly developed strong 
and characteristic interests. 

No period of youth escapes these disturbances of its peace, 
but they are especially likely to vex the early years of adoles- 
cence. New stirrings then arise that may easily conflict with 
older systems of impulses which still persist in " the uncon- 
scious," and so cause an inner discordance which only sub- 
limation can resolve. The strongest part of the case for 
universal continuation schools is that, under the conditions 
of modern life, they, and they only, can provide for the great 
majority of our boys and girls the means by which that sub- 
limation can be safely accomplished and the conflict of adoles- 
cence issue in a character at peace with itself and in full com- 
mand of its potential forces.^ For the continuation school, if 
properly administered, will, on the one hand, open fields of 
interest for the intellectual and aesthetic impulses that the 
conditions of industrial employment too often stifle and repress, 
and, on the other hand, provide a healthy social life to receive 
and give form to the energies which, in accordance with the 
inevitable law of human growth, are beginning to turn from 
their original objective, the home. The paucity of opportuni- 
ties of this kind for the bulk of our young population has no 
doubt caused an immense loss of individual happiness and 
social wealth, and is largely responsible for the " failure of 
civilization " which present-day moralists are wont to deplore. 

^ See Bompas Smith, " Problems of the Urban Continuation School," 
in the " Report of the Conference on New Ideals in Education" for 1917. 



RELiTIONS BETWEEN HORME .AJS'D MXEME 57 



NOTES ON BOOKS, ETC. 

Bbrnabd Ha.bt'9 little book, "The Psychology of Insanity" (Camb. 
Univ. Press, 1912), is a popular but sound introduction to the study of 
"complexes," written by a leading psychiatrist. (It should be noted that 
Dr. Hart appUes the term "'complex," as it is applied in this book, to all 
mnemic structures of the type described above, pp. 35-6, while most writers 
limit it — in the present author's opinion, unfortunately — to viorhid struc- 
tures and those that cause "irrational" behaviour.) Eexest Jo>"es, 
"Papers on Psycho- Analysis " (Bailliere, Tindall and Cox, 2nd edition, 
1918), is the best comprehensive introduction to the works of Freud, and 
has also great original value. Matteice Nicoix, "Dream Psychology'' 
(Oxford Univ. Press, 1917) is a popular study of the distinctive "features of 
Jung's views, which are given at length in C. G. JrxG, "Collect-ed Papers 
on Analytical Psychology" (tr. C. Long: Bailliere, Tindall and Cox, 1916). 
W. A. White, "Mechanisms of Character Formation" (The Macmillan 
Co., 1916), is a useful general review of the ideas of the psycho-analytical 
school. 0. Pfkter, "The Method of Psycho- Analysis " (tr. Payne; 
Kegan Paul, 191S), is a much more detailed work giving special considera- 
tion to educational applications. 



CHAPTER VI 

ROUTINE AND RITUAL 

The activities of humanity, we have said, may be broadly 
classified as either conservative or creative: conservative 
when their aim is to preserve in the face of a changing situation 
some status quo ante, creative when their aim is some positive 
new achievement. The distinction must not be confounded 
with the distinction between horme and mneme. Men often 
throw their energies most strongly into the maintenance of 
what is and show only a lukewarm interest in w hat might be. 
In short, conservative and creative activities are equally 
natural, and in a sense equally important expressions of 
human energy, though, taking a long view, we must no doubt 
think of the former as existing for the sake of the latter. 

These remarks have a clear educational application. A 
school fails to fulfil its purpose unless it is a place where the 
young are taught to accept and to maintain the best-tested 
traditions of thought and action handed down from the old 
time before them. Again it fails unless it serves as a " jump- 
ing-ofi place " for a generation trained to be eager for new 
adventures in life. This statement would be paradoxical if 
youth were not so made that it solves amhulando the problem 
of being at the same time both Tory and Radical. The 
famous pronouncement of the sentry in lolantJwj 

That every boy and every gal 

Who's bom into this world alive 
Is either a little Liberal 

Or else a little Conservative, 



ROUTINE AND RITUAL 59 

needs, in fact, important qualification. All children belong 
to both parties and intermingle their loyalties without any 
scruples. We propose in the present chapter to contemplate 
them when the conservative mood is most pronounced, in 
the next when their initiating impulses are most in evidence. 

Let us begin, then, by observing that the irreverent 
radicalism of young children is curiously streaked with con- 
servatism of a pronounced and uncompromising type. Ruth- 
less disturbers of our peace, irrepressible questioners of our way 
of life, children are yet great sticklers for law, order, and 
propriety, and so tenacious of tradition that their favourite 
toys are among the most venerable monuments of civilization, 
and their customary games the last stronghold of faiths that 
swayed mankind when the world was young. Every woman 
who has taken charge of another's nursery knows how serious 
a matter it is to disregard the established precedents iu washing 
and dressing, to violate the ritual of mealtime and bedtime ; 
and any one who, in telling children a familiar story, care- 
lessly takes liberties with the text will promptly be made 
aware of the magnitude of his indi^icretion. 

In behaviour of this pattern there is something more than 
mere resistance to change; there is an active reassertion of 
the past, a positive love of repetition of the familiar. Favour- 
ite games of infancy, such as " Ring a ring of roses " or " Here 
we come gathering nuts and may," exemplify that love — ■ 
which we may conveniently refer to as the " routine tendency " 
■ — both in the actions and in the accompanying jingles; while 
for an illustration of the same factor in favourite stories it is 
enough to mention that classic of the nursery, Southey's 
masterpiece, " The Three Bears." 

The crude repetition which forms the salt of so many 
childish amusements becomes, when elaborated and refined, the 
rhythmic repetition of the dance, the song, the ballad, the ode, 
and other forms of art. There can be no doubt that the love 
of rhythmic repetition springs from sources almost as deep 



60 EDUCATION: DATA AND FIRST PRINCIPLES 

as life itself. Rhythm rules in physiological activity, in 
breathing, in the circulation, in muscular action, in anabolism 
and katabolism. In many ways, obvious or hidden, the life 
of man moves obedient to the cosmic rhythms of the day 
and the year. It is natural, then, that the perception and 
creation of rhythm should be enjoyable and should, among 
other things, play an important role in the evolution of art. 
It is not surprising to find that among primitive peoples the 
rhythmic element in music is often highly developed, while the 
harmonic and even the melodic element is still rudimentary. 
Much the same was true of Greek music and for the same reason 
— namely, that the rhythm of music comes from the dance, and 
dance-rhythms are only the physiological rhythms of natural 
movement elaborated and formalized. The repetition and 
" balance " of pictorial and plastic art and the arts of weaving 
and embroidery are but expressions of the same factor in other 
media. .^-^ 

The modern school, following more closely the example 
of the Greeks, would do well to exploit more consciously 
and thoroughly than at present the natural love of rhythm. 
Teachers of " eurhythmies " are seeking to do this in connec- 
tion with dance-movement and musical appreciation. The 
simpler and less technical of their exercises might, with great 
advantage, be taught in all primary^ schools if only for the 
sake of fostering good manners, and tl^e dignity and grace of 
movement which the word eurhythmia {ivpvO/xLa) implied to 
the Greeks. It should be remembered, too, that rhythm 
makes appeal to the reason as well as to aesthetic sensibility. 
In the teaching of geometry, for instance, much more use 
might be made of the powerful and satisfying "principle of 
symmetry." 

As a child grows older the whimsical impulses in which 
the routine tendency is at first exhibited shape themselves 

1 Tiiis term, wherever it occurs in the following pages, means any school 
for ohildroa between the age.^ of six and twelve. 



ROUTINE AND RITUAL 61 

into more or less conscious conformity with ideals of conduct 
and social order. We shall deal later with the relation of the 
tendency to the " moral sense," but we may note at once the 
importance of its connection with the problem of school and 
classroom order — or, as it is less properly called, discipline. 

Professor Graham Wallas has remarked^ that " half-con- 
scious imitation . . . makes the greater part of classroom 
discipline." The statement explains the form taken by 
school and classroom order, but accounts only partially for its 
maintenance as a permanent feature of the social life. To 
understand this fully we must view it as an operation of the 
routine tendency, which, when a Avay of life has once been 
established, works powerfully to make it permanent. The 
prudent teacher who recognizes this fact will throw upon that 
tendency the main part of the burden of maintaining order. 
He will first take care that the business of the school or the 
classroom is conducted in accordance with an adequate but 
simple routine, and will then leave it, as far as possible, to 
" run itself." He will not check developments of the constitu- 
tion if they are spontaneous and harmless, but will abstain from 
introducing unnecessary or irritating innovations of his own. 
He will do wisely to tolerate even an unsatisfactory constitution 
if it has the force of the routine tendency behind it, and to 
wait patiently and work cautiously for its amendment. His 
attitude towards rebels will not be that of an autocrat whose 
personal will has been flouted, but rather the attitude of one 
responsible only as 'primus inter pares for the maintenance of a 
customary order upon which the convenience of all depends. 
In fine: the routine tendency should be allowed to act in 
school, as in the wider social community, like the flywheel 
whose momentum keeps a machine in orderly motion, over- 
comes obstacles and carries it past the " dead-points," where 
the prime motive forces cease for an instant to act. 

At a higher level of activity the same tendency helps 

^ " Human Nature in Politics," p. 28. 



62 EDUCATION: DATA AND FIRST PRINCIPLES 

greatly to maintain the " tone " and the " tradition " in 
which school discipline, as distinguished from mere order, 
may properly be said to reside. That is, it helps to secure 
the continuity in the school of a characteristic ethos and of a 
social custom touched with emotion — things which affect, 
often in the strongest manner, the young minds that are 
steeped for sufficient time in their influence. Here we have 
exemplified on a small scale the phenomena of " social 
heredity," whose most impressive manifestation is the sur- 
vival of nations, like Serbia or the Ukraine, after centuries 
of submergence. 

If conservation, in the active form of the routine tendency, 
is so conspicuous in early life, it is natural to suspect that it 
has for the young a utility distinct from its utility to the old. 
The suspicion is well founded. Old age clings to the familiar 
and the customary because it has no longer the energy needed 
to open out new paths of thought and action ; its self-assertion 
is reduced to self-maintenance in the face of a world growing 
always more intractable. In childhood, on the contrary, the 
routine tendency is an expression of superabundant activity. 
The child hungers to use his growing powers of body and 
mind, but his repertory of accomplishments is narrowly 
limited; he loves, therefore, to repeat the familiar, because he 
gets from it the fullest sense of effective self-assertion. 

This observation has great practical importance. Modern 
teachers in their zeal for cultivating the "self-activity " of 
children are prone to neglect the significance of the routine 
tendency. Reacting too far from unintelligent practices of 
former days, they avoid the repetition of the familiar, dis- 
missing it as " mechanical " or as " mere memory work," with 
the implication that it is somehow out of place in modern 
methods. They forget that children delight in it for the 
sound biological reason that it is an indispensable means to 
mastery of their little world. The young teacher may, then, 
safely disregard the view that the repetition of " tables," 



ROUTINE AND RITUAL 63 

dates, grammatical paradigms, arithmetical or algebraic 
operations is unpedagogical because it has to be forced upon 
unwilling nature. The child who rejoices in his power to 
repeat the jingle " Ena, dena, dina, do " will not fail to 
delight in a mastery over more serious forms of routine. 

This consideration does not, of course, absolve the teacher 
from the duty of making an intelligent use of the child's love 
of repetition. Dates should be memorized in order to support, 
as by a firm chronological skeleton, a body of historical in- 
formation and ideas that would otherwise be vague and in- 
coherent; the recitation of grammatical routines should be 
employed to fix knowledge abstracted from concrete linguistic 
usages;^ the mastery of algebraic manipulation should sub- 
serve immediately the needs of mathematical thought and 
should not outrun them; and so on in other cases. It has 
been suggested that the memorizing of verse and prose does 
not fall under this rule, and that the child's immediate plea- 
sure in routine-action may legitimately be exploited as a 
means of storing his mind with passages whose meaning and 
literary worth he cannot be expected to appreciate for several 
years. The soundness of the opinion is questionable. It is 
true that a literary masterpiece, however simple in form, often 
has depths of significance and beauty beyond the reach of 
young minds. Unless, however, it has some intelligible 
message for them, it is highly doubtful whether the routine 
tendency should be set to work on it. 

The foregoing principles have an equally direct bearing 
upon the pedagogy of the arts and crafts. An excellent 
authority has urged that a child who has once achieved a piece 
of constructional work should not repeat it, but should move 
on to a fresh exercise, involving new neuro-muscular co- 
ordination and leading to new ideas. He is surely wrong here. 

1 As in the case of the "litanies" clesci'ibed in R. B. Applcton, " Some 
Practical Suggestions on the Direct Method of Teaching Lathi" (HcSer 
and Sons, 1913). 



64 EDUCATION: DATA AND FIRST PRINCIPLES 

As we shall see later, mastery of one's material is a prime con- 
dition of sesthetic " self-expression "; no solid progress in the 
constructive arts, drawing and music, is possible without the 
constant repetition of familiar processes until one has them at 
the finger-ends. The only qualification this statement needs 
is that technical exercises should never be merely a gramma- 
tical drill isolated from creative work. Thus the beginner's 
** five-finger exercises " and corresponding exercises in sing- 
ing should always be melodious; and the mastery of con- 
structional technique should be acquired by making things 
that are desirable in themselves. At a later stage technical 
exercises, such as practice in joint-making in carpentry or in 
button-holing in needlework, may take a more abstract form; 
but they should always be of the nature of " studies " for 
substantive constructional work which the young craftsman 
or craftswoman has immediately in view. 

We turn now to another type of routine-actions of which 
we have familiar instances in the ceremonies used in laying a 
foundation-stone, at weddings, at the coronation of a king, and 
in the ofiice of the Mass. The character and sequence of such 
routines are often jealously preserved and faithfully trans- 
mitted through long periods of time, but they are clearly 
distinct in Iheir functions from those we have hitherto studied. 
Those routine-actions had substantive value — that is, the 
actions were in themselves desirable and desired. The value 
of these consists not in themselves, but in what they 
symbolize. In brief, their biological utility lies in their power 
of arousing in actors and spectators, as often as they are 
repeated, states of feeling or emotion that are frequently 
of great social importance. 

The most convenient name for these symbolic routine- 
actions is ritual. Ritual fills in the life even of the sober 
Englishman a place larger than is commonly recognized; 
but the ritual observances of the most emotional civilized 
people are only shreds and patches of the elaborate practices 



ROUTINE AND RITUAL 65 

of primitive tribes.^ For instance, May Day rites, now 
scarcely more than a memory in this country, are remnants 
of ancient festivals which, though taking different forma 
among forest-dwellers, agricultural folk and pastoral people, 
were always mimetic shows of " the seasons' difEerence," con- 
ventionalized, and fixed in form by a sacred tradition. They 
were enormously important to the public welfare; for, as 
everybody knew, the ritual, duly performed, had power to 
compel the earth to bring forth its kindly fruits in due season. 
The modern sociologist, who has other views on agricultural 
science, must still admit the psychological efficacy of the rites. 
For if they did not directly make the corn grow, they did so 
indirectly by transmuting vague anxiety about the food 
supply into an exalted corporate emotion that could not fail 
to inspirit and co-ordinate individual efEort. 

Good authorities maintain that both theology and art 
took their beginnings from ritual observances of this kind. 
For example, it is suggested by Miss Jane Harrison that 
belief in the god Dionysos may have sprung from a vivid way 
of conceiving the common and therefore permanent elements 
in the yearly rite of *' carrying in the summer." Where 
a may-pole was the centre of the rite he would be conceived as 
a Tree-god, where a holy bull was the focus of the ritual as 
a Bull-god, and so on. When life became easier and the social 
structure more complicated, the practice of the ritual would 
tend to become a professional business rather than a universal 
obligation. In this way the rites of Dionysos seem to have 
developed into that wonderful and sophisticated thing, the 
Greek tragedy; that is to say, ritual passed into art. Nor is 
this statement to be restricted to the drama and the arts 
immediately connected therewith. To a large extent, we are 
told, Greek sculptural art " comes out of ritual, has ritual 

1 See Dr. W. H. Rivers', "The Todas" (Maomillau, 1906) for a striking 
account of the immense importance of ritual observance in the life of a 
primitive people; also Spencer and Gillen, "The Native Tribes of Central 
Australia" (Macmillan, 1899). 

6 



66 EDUCATION: DATA AND FIRST PRINCIPLES 

as its subject, is embodied ritual " ; while even *' drawing is at 
bottom, like all the arts, a kind of gesture, a method of dancing 
on paper," and is therefore derived in the long run from 
ritual A Meanwhile among simpler or ignorant people the 
ancient rites, often, it is true, sadly maimed, have persisted 
side by side with their cultivated derivatives and continue to 
perform their primitive function as magical practices or as 
vehicles of lively social emotions. We still break a bottle 
of wine over a newly-launched ship " for luck," the Swabian 
peasant still leaps high over his hemp so that it may grow tall, 
while in the Christian villages of Thrace, the original home of 
Dionysos, " a drama is still annually performed which repro- 
duces with remarkable fidelity some of the most striking traits 
in the Dionysiac myth and ritual. "^ 

To suppose that modern art and religion draw their 
strength exclusively or even largely from these ancient sources 
would be to make a profound error. Nevertheless, if there 
is any validity in the recapitulation-theory (p. 39), ritual, 
properly employed, should still have an important function in 
school-life. The success of such revivals as historical 
pageants in honour of the genius loci of some ancient city or 
shire, the annual performance of mystery-plays, village dance- 
festivals, and other reactions from the drabness of nineteenth- 
century life, shows that even in the greater world ritual retains 
its power to communicate and exalt feeling among masses of 
people. We may, therefore, with greater confidence give it a 
larger place in the education of the young, using it as a means 
of intensifying and purifying social emotion. The main con- 
ditions of success are that the occasions shall be worthy and 
the expression sincere. Athletic festivals fulfil the second 
condition, but occasions better, or at least more varied may 
easily be found. The seasons are still venerable deities whom 

1 This explanation has been applied to the wonderful drawings of 
the oavo-raen of Altamira. See Sollas, "Ancient Hunters." 

2 J. (i. Frazor, " Spirits of the Corn and AVild" (pt. v. of the " Golden 
Bough"), vol. i., pp. 25-9. 



ROUTINE AND RITUAL 67 

children will delight to honour by song, procession and ritual 
dance.i For older boys and girls the festivals may be asso- 
ciated with important events in school-life — such as the 
appointment of prefects andthe dismissal of senior scholars into 
the world — or with civic and national interests and history. 
In all cases it is important that the ritual should not bear too 
obviously the stamp of external authority, but should, as far 
as possible, be crystallized and refined from spontaneous 
movements among the citizens of the school society. It 
should give work for the young poets, musicians, actors and 
craftsfolk, and should provide a place for the ungifted girl 
or boy who can only carry a flower or join in a chorus. We 
may add that valuable hints with regard to suitable occasions 
and forms of ritual may be derived from a study of the cere- 
monies prescribed for use among " wolf cubs " and boy 
scouts. 

NOTES ON BOOKS, ETC. 

J. Sully, "Studies of Childhood" (Longmans, new ed. 1903) gives a 
pleasing account of the facts referred to at the beginning of the chapter. 
The quotations towards the end are mostly from Miss Jane Harrison's 
little book, "Ancient Art and Ritual" (Home Univ. Library, 1914). 
C. Delisle Burns, " Greek Ideals " (Bell, 1917), gives a vivid picture of the 
importance of public ceremonial in ancient Atheuiau life. F. H. Haywahd 
and A. Freeman, "The Spiritual Foundations of Reconstruction" (P. S. 
King, 1919), deal specially with the use of ritual in school -life, but appeared 
too late to be consulted. 

1 The May Day festival seems to be growing in popularity in London 
Elementary Schools, and is often made a means of valuable culture in 
manners, music and dancing. 



CHAPTER VII 

PLAY 

The creative activities of youth have, like the conservative, 
a typical and pronounced form of manifestation. It is play. 

The spirit of play is an intangible and elusive sprite, whose 
influence is to be found in corners of life where it might least 
be expected. Everyone agrees, however, that childhood is 
her peculiar sphere, and that she manifests her presence there 
in activities whose special mark is their spontaneity — that is, 
their relative independence of external needs and stimuli. 
It is for this reason that play is commonly interpreted as an 
expression of " superfluous energy." During childhood and 
youth, ii is said, the organism has at its disposal more energy, 
both physical and psychical, than it needs either for mere 
self-maintenance or for physical growth, and it expends the 
surplus largely in the form of play. 

Upon this view a child at play may be likened to a locomo- 
tive engine which has taken from the coal more energy than 
is needed to draw the train and is therefore compelled to 
** let ofi steam." The analogy is, however, defective in one 
important respect. In the modern railway engine some of the 
energy not required for locomotion is employed to exhaust 
the vacuum brakes and warm the carriages. Without much 
extravagance of fancy we might suppose this use of the super- 
fluous energy to be considerably extended. For example, 
the driver, instead of blowing off steam in a station, might 
direct it to a small rotary press in the guard's van, where a few 
copies of the next month's time-table might be printed. But 

68 



PLAY 69 

the liveliest imagination cannot conceive it as used to improve 
the engine itself, to make the boiler tubes more eflficient, or to 
increase the harmony of relations between pistons, cranks 
and wheels. Yet in the psychophysical organism play does 
something precisely comparable with this. In play — first 
the play of arms and legs and fingers as the babe lies in his 
cradle, then run-about play, and later the formal games of 
the playground and the field — the child gradually enters 
into possession of his own body, and raises his command over 
it to the highest possible power. Again, he finds and exercises 
in play his intellectual gifts and powers, and often discovers 
the interests that are to fill the central place in his adult life. 
Lastly, it is a commonplace that, just as of old the Hellenic 
ideals of life and conduct were fostered and spread by the great 
games and festivals, so to-day many a boy finds and estab- 
lishes his moral and social self largely in the corporate games 
of adolescence — a statement which is becoming increasingly 
true of girls also. 

These familiar facts all illuminate a single truth — namely, 
that the play-activity is subject to the general law that spon- 
taneous activity, when not baffled or obstructed by unfavour- 
able circumstances, tends always towards increasing perfection 
of form, to more complete expressiveness, to a higher degree of 
unity in diversity. Thus we are led to the idea that nature 
invented play not merely as a means of disposing harmlessly 
of the young animal's superfluous energy, but as a device for 
using that energy to prepare him for the serious business of 
life. 

This view of the biological utility of play was suggested long 
ago by the philosopher Malebranche,^ but was first fully formu- 
lated and defended by Karl Groos.^ Groos's theory is based 
upon two observations. He notes first that play is confined 
to animals which are at birth not sufficiently developed to 

1 See Drever, " lustiaot in Man," p. 33. 

2 In "The Play of Animala," 1896, and "The Play of Man," 1898. 



70 EDUCATION: DATA AND FIRST PRINCIPLES 

face the difficulties of life without the help and protection of 
their parents. The puppy, born blind and helpless, enjoys 
some months of undiluted play ; the chick, who, a few minutes 
after he is hatched, can pick up a grain of rice or tackle a 
worm, affects ah ovo an almost puritanical severity of be- 
haviour. Secondly, Groos bids us observe that when au 
animal plays he always imitates in sport what will be the serious 
activities of his adult days. The kitten hunts a ball of wool 
as he will later hunt a mouse; the puppy chases and dodges 
his brother as he will some day chase and dodge his prey or 
his foe. When these facts have once been perceived, the 
interpretation is easy. A playful youth is a biological device 
to secure to the higher animals an efficient equipment for the 
battle of life. It is not so true, says Groos epigrammatically, 
that animals play while they are young as that they are 
young so long as it is necessary for them to play, in 
order to prepare themselves for the serious business of 
adult life. 

There is no difficulty in extending this explanation to the 
play of childhood. The devotion of the little girl to her doll 
is the capital instance of a playful activity which is plainly 
anticipatory of the serious business of adult life. A similar 
interpretation may be applied to other games, which recur 
with unbroken regularity in every generation and among 
children of every colour. There is, however, in respect of play, 
as in respect of all mental phenomena, a most important differ- 
ence between man and the lower animals. The adult activities 
of these are relatively few and relatively constant in pattern. 
Consequently the play of each species is stereotyped and shows 
little variety. On the other hand, the adult life that awaits 
the child is very largely undetermined. Nature, therefore, 
while she bids the young beast rehearse in sport just those 
activities which he will certainly use some day in earnest, 
prompts the boy to experiment in his play with an endless 
variety of possible lives. In this way we may account on bio- 



PLAY 71 

logical principles for the incessant " make-believe " which 
is so universal a characteristic of childhood- 
According to Karl Groos, then, play, biologically con- 
sidered, is anticipatory. According to another interpreter, 
Professor Stanley Hall,^ it is often more properly to be regarded 
as reminiscent. In his view, the plays of childhood are simply 
incidents in the recapitulation, which the life of every in- 
dividual exhibits, of the history of the race. For example, the 
absorption of the boy of nine in imaginary hunting and blood- 
shed is, like the characteristic bodily form at that age, a 
momentary representation of a pigmoid or Bushman stage 
which the race has long left behind. These developmental 
incidents may have no more direct reference to adult needs 
than the tail of the tadpole has to the needs of the frog. 
Nevertheless, says Stanley Hall, their transitory appearance 
in due course is necessary to a healthy manhood just as the 
batrachian must produce and absorb his tadpole tail before 
he can settle down as a reputable frog. 

When we ask for the biological reasons why the play of 
childhood should thus keep alive the memory of " old un- 
happy far-ofi things " — phases in the racial history which had 
better be forgotten — Stanley Hall tells us that they are often 
cathartic in their operation. Man cannot shed altogether 
the ancient tendencies to cruelty and vice, but play is at once 
a means by which the mischief may be taken out of them and 
a means by which they may be transformed into impulses 
of ethical value. 

In Hall's opinion Groos's account of the subject is *' very 
partial, superficial and perverse." It is, nevertheless, per- 
missible to suggest that the two theories are complementary 
rather than opposed. Thus it may be true that spontaneous 
play often derives its typical features from the adult life of 
distant ages, and also true that these racial memories still re- 
awaken in each generation because they have a direct value 

^ "Adolescence," vol. i., ch. iii. 



72 EDUCATION: DATA AND FIRST PRINCIPLES 

for the adult life of the present epoch. Or, putting the same 
point in another way, we may hold that the atavistic factors 
are the mnemic basis from which the child's forward-directed 
horme proceeds, while the " cathartic " action of play is the 
sublimation of the energies associated with them. 

If we thus assume that the rival theories differ chiefly 
in emphasizing different aspects of what is at bottom a single 
phenomenon, we shall be free to use them both in accordance 
with their relevance to particular cases. For example, 
Stanley Hall's view is most helpful in the case of play which, 
like dancing and out-door games, is fundamentally a motor 
phenomenon. His dictum that " play is the purest expression 
of motor heredity " is here peculiarly illuminating. It leads 
straight to the idea that the substitution of dancing, eurhyth- 
mies and acting for some of the more formal physical exercises 
may not only help the Briton to take his pleasures less sadly, 
but may be the best of ways of securing for him mastery over 
the body which he has inherited from his forbears. More- 
over, it gives at least some support to the speculation that 
our native dances, now being rescued with the old folk-songs 
from the wreck of time, may be a better medium for the 
physical culture of the young Anglo-Saxon than the saltatory 
idioms of the Latin races or the Slavs. 

On the other hand, where play engages the intellect rather 
than the body, Groos's interpretation is the more instructive 
and, as we shall see later, the more fruitful from the standpoint 
of the educator. 

The " superfluous energy " theory, illuminating as it is, 
does not, in its direct form, cover all the ground. 

Consider, for ex:ample, the weary child who forgets his 
aching legs when the monotonous walk is turned into a game 
of hide-and-seek, or the tired man who returns to his work 
refreshed from a game of billiards or golf. It is clear that play 
is in these cases not a channel of discharge for superfluous 
energy, but a means by which new energy is placed at the dis- 



PLAY 73 

posal of the organism. Accordingto the common explanation, 
the efficacy of such " recreative " play lies in the fact that it 
uses the energy of fresh tracts of the nervous system and gives 
the exhausted tracts time to get rid of the chemical poisons 
which have accumulated in them and to make good their losses 
by anabolism. The examples here given, especially the former, 
show that this explanation is quite insufficient. Under the 
influence of play, the child not only continues the activity 
which had wearied him, but actually puts twice as much 
vigour into it. 

It is probable that a better explanation will be found in one 
of the many profound and illuminating ideas which psychology 
and education owe to Professor W. McDougall. In a notable 
study of fatigue,! McDougall quotes instances to prove that 
the energy we can expend upon a certain kind of work is not 
necessarily limited to the energy resident in the nervous 
machinery which is directly concerned in its production. 
Many cases of long-sustained activity would be unintelligible 
unless we could suppose that the brain structures involved in 
them import energy from sources outside themselves .^ 
Further, he identifies these sources with certain structures 
whose functioning is believed to be necessary to the mani- 
festations of the innate " dispositions " {i.e., racial engram- 
complexes), which are the great springs of behaviour both in 
beasts and men. It may be suggested, then, that in recreative 
play we have phenomena essentially the same as those which 
McDougall describes. The task which the appropriate physio- 
logical mechanism has insufficient energy to perform is con- 
quered by means of energy drawn from the more massive in- 
herited engram-complexes. So the hardships of a river picnic 

^ *' Report of the British Association," 1908. 

^ McDougall quotes from William James the case of Colonel Baird Smith, 
who, during some months of the siege of Delhi, hardly ate or slept or rested 
in any way, but worked almost continuously at tremendous pressure without 
showing or feeling fatigue. This example could be paralleled by many in- 
stances taken from the Great European War. 



74 EDUCATION: DATA AND FIRST PRINCIPLES 

may be endured joyfully by virtue of the energy derived from 
a mild and perfectly conscious flirtation. So the boy at the 
bottom of the class can perform prodigies of learning when he 
is fighting for his side in a Latin match between opposing 
teams. 

It will be profitable to restate this argument in a way more 
obviously congruent with the general tenor of our doctrine of 
vital activity. We are concerned with movements of self- 
assertion which are on the point of failure because the im- 
pulses behind them are obstructed or exhausted, and what 
we see is that such movements may often be saved from ex- 
tinction by being transformed or Absorbed into other modes of 
self-assertion, whose basis in the organism's disposition is more 
firmly established and whose energy is still fresh. Ex- 
pressed thus, the explanation is not only brought into an 
interesting connection with the theory of sublimation, but 
is also seen to have significance for education far beyond the 
facts of recreative play. 

The types of play-activity called " games " and " sports " 
are generally spoken of as recreation, and it may be granted 
that they frequently perform the function we have ascribed 
to recreative play. It should, however, be noted, first, that 
they often serve merely as vehicles for the direct discharge of 
superfluous energy; and, secondly, that they often perform 
a function, distinct both from this and from recreation — a 
function best described as ** relaxation." To understand the 
biological meaning of relaxation, we must first observe that 
games, such as football and dancing, and sports, such as hunt- 
ing and fishing, difier from inventive or imaginative play — the 
former in that they are activities ruled by a definite formula or 
routine, the latter in that they are behaviour coming obviously 
under Hall's theory of atavistic reversion. They are alike, 
then, in being activities based directly upon elements deeply 
rooted in the agent's disposition. In other words, the hormic 
systems that come into action in games and sports are always 



PLAY 75 

firmly consolidated and are often, in addition, of great anti- 
quity. This fact accounts, in the first place, for the readiness 
with which they become vehicles for the discharge of super- 
fluous energy. It also accounts for their use, both by adults 
and by young people, as means of relaxation. The daily 
work of the business or the professional man, especially in a 
highly organized modern community, throws a great strain 
upon the organism ; for it involves the action and maintenance 
of extremely elaborate and artificial hormic systems. From 
time to time, therefore, the agent seeks relief by simplifying 
his life — that is, by turning to activities that involve less com- 
plex and more firmly established hormic systems. These he 
finds in games and sports. He deserts his office for the golf- 
links, or flees from his " practice " to a trout stream in the 
quiet depths of the country. For the same reason the school-boy 
welcomes the moment when he may escape from the oppressive 
labour of classroom or study to the playing field or the river.^ 
Changing the standpoint we have now to inquire what are 
the distinctive marks of play as a mode of experience. The 
reply frequently given is that play is activity pursued for its 
own sake as activity and without regard to any value in the 
product . It is thus contrasted with work, in which the activity 
is pursued for the sake of some further value beyond itself. 
We must concede a certain validity to the statement. An 
adult often makes this distinction between his work and his 
play, and even young children may be obscurely aware of 
something equivalent to it. For instance, the Directors of the 
Caldecott Community^ remark that " at one time it was hoped 

1 See Q. T. Patkiok, "The Psychology of Relaxation" (Constable, 1916). 
This writer invokes the same biological conception to explain the present 
vogue of the "photo-drama," the psychological function of prof ane swearing, 
the use of strong druak, and the periodic relapse of civilized peoples into 
the barbarism of war. The reader may attemjjt, as a rider on the foregoing 
argument, to account himself for these several forms of " relaxation." 

2 In their Report for 1916-17 (obtainable from the Secretary, Charlton, 
near East Sutton, Kent). One of the Directors, Miss Rendel, has con- 
tributed an account of the Community to Clarke Hall's " The Child and the 
State" (Headley, 1917). 



76 EDUCATION: DATA AND FIRST PRINCIPLES 

that no hard-and-fast line would need to be drawn between 
work and play, but that the term * occupation ' might cover 
activities of study and playroom alike. A certain standard 
of work, however, is demanded in the schoolroom, even by 
the children themselves, v/hilst during playtime no standard is 
required ; and this seems to constitute the essential difierence 
between the two." 

Interesting and important as this observation is, we must 
be careful as to what general conclusion is drawn from it. 
It is notorious, for example, that among the boys and some- 
times even the masters^ of our public schools it is play rather 
than work that is felt to have value beyond the activity itself, 
and to impose upon the agent a high standard of aim and 
disciplined effort. And among adults we have the musicians 
and actors, who accept the name of " players " but would 
resent the suggestion that their activities have no value and 
are unruled by standard as bitterly and as justly as they would 
the implication that their " playing " is not work. 

These are not exceptional or unfair instances . They merely 
show, in a specially clear way, that, as Mr. F. H. Bradley has 
urged,^ it is impossible to maintain a psychological antithesis 
between play and work. What, then, is really the distinction 
which the rejected antithesis misrepresents ? Here we will 
accept Mr. Bradley's further guidance. According to his 
analysis the psychological colour of our activities is chiefly due 
to two factors which enter into them in varying proportions. 
One of these factors consists in the conditions which are im- 
posed on the agent ah ecctra; the other is his spontaneity. The 
difference between the two appears readily in the analysis 
of any activity — for example, eating one's dinner. The 
mainspring of this activity is obviously an imperative, which 
no one can ignore and live. Nature says: Thou shalt eat. 

^ The character called "The Bull" in Alec Waugh's much discussed 
novel, "The Loom of Youth," illustrates the attitude strikingly. 

^ In his article, " On Floating Ideas and the Imaginary" {Mind, N.S., 
No. 60). 



PLAY 77 

But she leaves a fortunate minority of us considerable freedom 
to choose the matter and the manner of our eating. We may 
dine in slippered ease on a chop at home, or we may go forth in 
state to an eight-course banquet at a fashionable restaurant. 
The boundary between spontaneity and external constraint 
shifts, of course, from case to case. At the gorgeous tables 
of the great there may be many hankerers after the simple life. 
They hate the Persicos adparatus, but their circumstances of 
life cause these to be among the unalterable conditions of 
dining. 

In this illustration the external constraint is ultimate. I 
need not necessarily eat here or thus, but eat somewhere and 
somehow I surely must. In other forms of activity the con- 
straint which limits the activity is not ultimate. Thus, if I 
play football or auction bridge, I am bound by the rules of the 
game; but the acceptance of the rules is itself voluntary. 
I can escape them by standing out of the game or by persuad- 
ing my companions to adopt a new code. But if I decide 
to " play the game," my spontaneity must limit itself to the 
operations of attack, defence and finesse which the rules 
sanction and the tactics of my opponents leave possible. 
Similarly if I decide to fill the role of Hamlet in a performance 
of the tragedy, Shakespeare's text becomes a condition of 
restraint, and spontaneity is limited to " interpreting " the 
poet's lines. 

Here, then, is the basis of the limited validity we grant to 
the antithesis between play and work. An agent thinks of 
his activity as play if he can take it up or lay it down at 
choice or vary at will the conditions of its exercise ; he thinks 
of it as work if it is imposed on him by unavoidable 
necessity, or if he is held to it by a sense of duty or vocation. 
For in activities of the former class spontaneity rules almost 
unchecked, while in those of the second kind it is frequently 
obstructed by conditions of constraint. But where spontaneity 
is able to triumph over the constraining conditions, the 



78 EDUCATION: DATA AND FIRST PRINCIPLES 

experience has always the quality typical of play, whether the 
activity be called " play " or " work " ; from the inner stand- 
point, the two become, in fact, one and indistinguishable. 
Thus, if I am a successful engineer, or an inspiring teacher, or a 
skilful surgeon, my " work " may have all the felt qualities 
of play; while if I am a duffer at my profession its exercise 
may be an intolerable burden. In short, the play-experience 
is, as Mr. A. F. Shand has pointed out,i inseparably connected 
with joy. On the one hand, joy tends naturally to express 
itself in the physical movements and the imitations of serious 
activities which are typical of children's play; on the other 
hand, any task becomes play to the man who can do it 
with the ease of mastery which brings joy in the doing. 

The connection which languages so commonlj'' recognize 
between " playing " and the arts of music and the drama has 
been made by some thinkers, notably the poet Schiller, the 
basis of a philosophy embracing all art in its scope. This 
affiliation of art to play is far from implying a mean estimate 
of the artist's labours. It proceeds from the sound observation 
that the soul of art, like that of play, is the joyous exercise 
of spontaneity. Even in cases where poets " learn in suffer- 
ing what they teach in song," we may be sure that they find a 
rich, if austere, joy in their power to transmute their sorrows 
into pure and noble self-expression. Again, art is continuous 
with play, inasmuch as it exhibits on a higher level of serious- 
ness and value the submission of energy to form. Just as the 
delight of the true cricketer is not in the mere expenditure 
of physical energy but in the expression of his strength in the 
disciplined forms prescribed by the tradition of the game, 
so the nobler joy of the painter, the sculptor, the poet, the 
musician comes from the triumphant expression of spiritual 
energy through "significant forms." We may expect, then, 
as Schiller has profoundly observed,^ that the nature of a 

1 "The Foumlations of Character" (Macmillan, 1914), bk. ii., ch. viii. 

2 " Ueber die asthetische Erziehung des Mouachen," Letter 15. 



PLAY 79 

people's play will foreshadow the quality and value of their 
art. It is not an accident that the noblest achievements of 
antique art were won by the race that cherished the humane 
and healthy Olympic games, not by the race that loved the 
horrible sports of the gladiatorial arena. 

The reader may profitably reflect upon the connection 
between Schiller's doctrine and the remarks about the culti- 
vation of ritual which we made in the preceding chapter. 
Meanwhile let us note that a doctrine similar in essentials to 
Schiller's theory of " pure " art has been applied by William 
Morris and other modern writers to craftsmanship. In their 
view beauty in craftsmanship is a play-phenomenon; for it 
is simply the disciplined expression of the maker's delight 
in a process he has learnt to carry out with the ease of mas- 
tery. Let us suppose that we could have watched the early 
stages of one of the crafts to which the primitive masters of 
mankind devoted their genius — for example, the manufacture 
of flint weapons or of earthen pots. However great the ability 
that was brought to bear upon those inventions, there is little 
doubt that the bare solution of the problems they presented 
absorbed it all. The first spear-heads were merely things 
that would pierce the body of a beast or a foe; the first pots 
were merely things that would hold water and resist heat. 
But as repetition of the process brought skill and mastery over 
the materials, the bare solution of the problem demanded less 
and less energy, and more was available for other purposes. 
Given that the craftsman took pleasure in his work and that 
his labours were inspired by worthy emotions, the " superfluous 
energy," says the theory, would inevitably express itself as 
beauty. The flint weapon, the pot, became more than a 
mere weapon, a mere pot ; they became beautiful. 

This doctrine has great importance for aesthetic education. 
It teaches that the power to produce beauty is not a gift grudg- 
ingly given by the gods to a mere sprinkling of fortunate 
beings; but an ability which, though varying in strength, 



80 EDUCATION: DATA AND FIRST PRINCIPLES 

like other abilities, from individual to individual, is yet as 
universal as the power to learn arithmetic. Let boys and 
girls make under conditions that stimulate the natural flow 
of energy, let their social milieu be free and humane, let them 
acquire by pleasant repetition (see p. 62) the mastery that 
enables them to 'play with their materials — and beauty will 
inevitably appear, though in varied measure, in the things 
they create. 

We turn now to another element in play upon which much 
stress is commonly laid — the element of " make-believe." 
In considering it we must beware, as Mr. W. H. Winch warns 
U3,l of reading phenomena of adult life into the play of children. 
To the adult mind no distinction seems so evident and so sharp 
as the distinction between the hard, cold world of objective 
fact and the subjective world of purpose, thought and fancy. 
We are prone to forget that the child does not find this dis- 
tinction ready made for him, but has, by gradual and often 
painful experience, to discover its existence and nature. 
Thus, as Winch urges, much that is attributed to the child's 
faculty of making-believe may be due not to the transforming 
power of imagination but to ignorance and a sheer inability 
to see the world around him as it really is.^ 

Where making-believe indubitably takes place its function 
may usefully be compared with what happens in cases of 
conflict between two hostile complexes or systems of ideas 
and emotions in a diseased mind. Very generally one of these 
drives the other entirely out of the field of attention — as when 
a lady,^ who constantly maintains that she is the rightful 
Queen of England, ignores the incompatibility of her royal 
status with the lowlier duties of charing by which she earns 
her living. The normal child at play has the same power 

^ "Psychology and Philosophy of Play" {Mind, N.S., vol. xv.). 

2 Compare R. L. Stevenson's remarks on children's imagination in the 
essay on "Child's Play" in " Virginibus Puerisque." 

3 This illustration is taken from Bernard Hart, " Psychology of Insanity " 
(Cambridge Manuals of Literature and Science). 



PLAY 81 

of ignoring realities that challenge the truth of his ideas, 
" The chair he has just been besieging as a castle, or valiantly 
cutting to the ground as a dragon, is taken away for the accom- 
modation of a morning visitor, and he is nothing abashed ; he 
can skirmish by the hour with a stationary coal-scuttle; in 
the midst of the enchanted pleasance he can see, without 
sensible shock, the gardener soberly digging potatoes for the 
day's dinner. "1 

In other cases of insanity the complexes are so equally 
matched that neither can suppress the other, and a modus 
Vivendi must somehow be found. This is generally made 
possible by a supplementary set of ideas which — simply 
because they reconcile the incompatibility of the original 
complexes — may be embraced by the patient with the utmost 
fervour of belief. Thus the rightful Queen of England may 
become convinced that her actual humble position is due to a 
conspiracy to keep her from her throne, and finds evidence of 
the plot at every turn. 

By precisely similar devices, adopted with something of 
the same conviction, the child is wont to reconcile facts and 
ideas whose warfare would disturb his mental peace. Here, 
often, is the explanation of a child's fibbing and of his inability 
to keep the memory of facts free from the embroidery of 
fable. It is, further, one of the commonest features of his 
"make-believe" play. From Stevenson's mine of illustra- 
tions comes a gem of the first water. It is the story of a little 
boy who could join in a game of football only upon the theory 
that it was a battle, and " was mightily exercised about the 
presence of the ball, and had to spirit himself up, whenever he 
came to play, with an elaborate story of enchantment, and 
take the missile as a sort of talisman bandied about in conflict 
between two Arabian nations." 

Instances such as these show that the mind of a child 
at play may, like the mind of an insane adult, be at the mercy 

1 Stevensoa, " Child's Play." 



82 EDUCATION: DATA AND FIRST PRINCIPLES 

of a group of ideas which, though it has little or no relation 
to the actual world, may capture and control the whole 
current of his consciousness. Stevenson tells us how for 
weeks together a child may be unable to deal with the most 
ordinary and humdrum situations of life except in terms of 
the fancies dominant at the moment. " Perhaps," he writes 
in an admirable passage, '* the most exciting moments I ever 
had over a meal were in the case of calves'-feet jelly. It was 
hardly possible not to believe . . . that some part of it was 
hollow, and that sooner or later my spoon would lay open the 
secret tabernacle of the golden rock. There, might some 
miniature Red Beard await his hour; there, might one find 
the treasures of the Forty Thieves and bewildered Cassim 
beating about the walls. And so I quarried on slowly, with 
bated breath, savouring the interest. Believe me, I had little 
palate left for the jelly; and, though I preferred the taste 
when I took cream with it, I used often to go without, because 
the cream dimmed the transparent fractures." 

The analogy between the child's making-believe and some 
phenomena of insanity is instructive, but it must not be pressed 
too far. A child's mind is rarely so securely bound to its 
fancies that it cannot escape from them easily enough if 
need arise; and, as Stevenson points out, a single touch of 
pain will suffice to bring him back to the actual at any 
moment. Moreover, there is a fundamental diflterence 
between the deeper significance of making-believe and in- 
sanity which their formal resemblance must not lead us to 
overlook. The delusions of the insane are not merely the 
jangling of sweet bells out of tune. They can generally be 
interpreted biologically as the refuge of a weak spirit which 
cannot bear " the weary weight of all this unintelligible world." 
They are the expression of a defect of energy. The strong mind 
takes arms against a sea of troubles and, by opposing, ends 
them. The weak mind gives up the attempt to maintain 
relations with the whole of the real environment, and simplifies 



PLAY 83 

the problem by ignoring a great part of i t . On the other hand, 
the making-believe of the child is, as we have seen, an ex- 
pression not of a defect, but of an overplus of energy. The 
elan vital which drives the child along his life's course is not 
wholly absorbed by the activities necessary to maintain 
relations with the actual world. It urges him to multiply and 
enrich his experiences, to enlarge his soul by experiments in a 
thousand ways of life. Insanity is a phenomenon of shrink- 
age, of decay; the child's making-believe is a phenomenon of 
expansion, of growth.^ Unable, through weakness and 
ignorance, to bend the stubborn reality of things to his will, 
to achieve his far-reaching purposes objectively, he employs 
the magic of making-believe, as Aladdin employed the genie 
of the lamp, to supply the means his ends demand, to remould 
the world nearer to his heart's desire. 

According to this explanation the child's habit of making- 
believe does not imply that he prefers his fantasy-world to 
reality. It is merely a biological device to secure that his 
self-assertion during the formative years of life shall not be 
frustrated by his inability to control the real conditions of his 
activities.^ We should expect, therefore, that as age brings 
fuller knowledge and completer command of those conditions, 
the make-believe element would diminish in importance. 
And that is precisely what we find. Stevenson's little cam- 
peador skirmishing valiantly with the coal-scuttle is at the 

1 Compare what wo have said about the routine-tendency (p. 62). 

2 This observation has a close bearing on the current dispute between 
the orthodox Froebelians and the followers of Dr. Montessori with regard to 
the educational value of play. The controversy follows largely from the 
fact that both sides tacitly assume making- believe to be an essential feature 
of play (as distinguished from games). The Froebelians, believing that play 
has great educational value, encourage the child to make-believe because 
they think he cannot play without doing so. The Montessorians, who 
regard making-believe as frivolous and a form of untruth, are driven for 
the same reason to dispute the educational value of play. From the stand- 
point taken in the text, Froebelian practice errs where it introduces making- 
believe gratuitously, that is, where the child's spontaneity does not need 
its aid, and the Montessorians err in refusing that aid where it would serve 
to widen the child's range of serious interests and achievements. 



84 EDUCATION: DATA AND FIRST PRINCIPLES 

first level of the process. The nursery- world yields none of the 
conditions his heroic impulses demand; so fancy must trans- 
late it into a stage suitably set for knight-errantry. Don 
Quixote, a grown-up child, could satisfy like impulses with a 
less extensive transformation of reality. His arms and 
accoutrements were real and Rozinante was genuine horse- 
flesh; but fancy had to turn the windmills into giants. Thus 
the don's famous deeds typify a stage in which spontaneity, 
though it cannot dispense with making-believe, has yet cap- 
tured at least some of the real conditions for the activity it 
has chosen. The same stage is illustrated by a young friend of 
the author, who having recently been photographed, thirsted 
to be himself a photographer. A cardboard box and a magni- 
fying glass were easily fashioned into a camera, and, casting 
a shawl over his head, the boy performed with exact veri- 
similitude the process of focusing the picture on the screen. 
Then came the crux. He knew that the image must be re- 
ceived on a sensitive plate and developed by chemical action. 
Unhappily he had neither plate nor developer nor any hope 
of obtaining them. It was here that the power of making- 
believe — ^the fairy godmother who turned Cinderella's rags 
into jewelled splendour and the six mice into prancing steeds — 
came to his aid. The only fluid, recognizably " chemical," 
upon which he could lay his hands was vinegar ; but why should 
not vinegar do ? So with scrupulous care he took the * * plate ' * 
into a dark cupboard, solemnly washed "it with vinegar, and 
persuaded himself that the lines of his picture, faint but un- 
mistakable, were actually fixed upon the surface. 

Only childhood enjoys the privilege of fulfilling its im- 
pulses by this high-handed treatment of inconvenient facts. 
As the shades of the prison house of reality close round the 
growing boyhis ideasareforcedintoever-increasingcongruence 
with the external world; instead of controlling they become 
themselves controlled. Nevertheless, the power of making- 
believe remains, and may still perform an essential function 



PLAY 85 

in securing freedom for the development of spontaneity. We 
owe by far the most impressive example of this truth to the 
psychological insight and happy invention of the founder of 
the Boy Scout movement. The basal assumptions of the 
scout organization are pure make-believe; the scout's pictur- 
esque costume, his " patrol-animal " or totem, his secret 
signs, his " spooring," all belong to a realm of facts and ideas 
queerly incongruent with the humdrum actuality of civilized 
life. Yet the geography, geometry, and nature-lore that he 
learns as a scout are genuine science; the moral lessons he 
receives are not only entirely serious but have a strong and 
abiding influence upon his character ; and it is from the atmo- 
sphere of making-believe that he draws the Intellectual and 
spiritual vigour which make what he thus learns often far more 
valuable than anything he acquires from his teachers at school. 
It is not surprising that, impressed by this fact, a number of 
headmasters and headmistresses of secondary schools have 
boldly converted their junior forms into patrols of boy scouts 
or girl guides.^ Their experience should throw valuable light 
upon the question whether the movement can retain its 
energizing power within the school walls and over the whole 
range of the curriculum. 

An interesting and important question is raised when we 
ask what is the natural sequel to the boy scout stage in educa- 
tion. The problem is to determine the form the fantasy- 
element should take as the youth's ideas reach still closer 
congruence with the actual conditions of adult life. In the 
opinion of many, the cadet corps is the natural successor to 
the scout troop. Without entering into the merits of this 
proposal, which raises issues too serious to be dealt with 
briefly, we may yet contend that military training is too 
narrow in its scope and aims to represent adequately what 
scout training does for the boy from twelve to fifteen years of 
age. The need is rather for sodalities on a basis wide enough 

1 See Ernest Young's article, " Scouting^ — Its Educiitional Value," in 
the Report of the Conference on New Ideals in Education for 1916. 



86 EDUCATION: DATA AND FIRST PRINCIPLES 

to capture and develop all the new interests of adolescence. 
A summer camp, or something equivalent thereto, would 
probably be an essential feature in the activity of such or- 
ganizations. Camp life would replace the imaginative basis of 
the boy scout stage with something demanding less making- 
believe, yet capable of stimulating in a similar way physical, 
social and moral culture; for instance, it could be used to 
preserve as a permanent element in education the tradition of 
national service established by the vacation work of public 
schoolboys and college girls during the Great War. In the 
winter months the natural aims of the associations would be 
to guide the play-impulses of their members into the channels 
of art — to encourage expression in music, the drama, crafts- 
manship, and the like — and to foster interest in matters of 
practical citizenship. 

Sodalities with some such aims as these will be, it may be 
urged, well-nigh indispensable adjuncts to the new continua- 
tion schools, and should in some form be represented in or in 
connection with every school for older boys and girls. Their 
activities would not, however, exhaust the range of impulses 
subject to the play-tendency; there remains the whole field 
covered by school learning in the narrower sense of the 
term. 

No candid observer can doubt that school teaching would 
be immensely more efficient if teachers could learn to exploit 
the intellectual energy released so abundantly in play. Sad 
witness to this truth is borne by the long list of writers, dis- 
coverers and men of action who have accused their school 
education of being useless, sometimes even hostile, to their 
development. And these men, whose intellectual force was 
great enough to bring their play-dreams to maturity, are only 
island-peaks standing out from a submerged continent of 
ability. School instruction, narrow, unimaginative and over- 
formalized, was too often the direct cause of the submergence. 
It is not extravagant to say that if such losses are to be avoided 



PLAY 87 

teaching methods must aim deliberately at feeding the im- 
pulse to intellectual play. This does not mean that intellectual 
dissipation is to be encouraged or even tolerated, but that the 
child's impulses to " experiment with life " should be taken 
as our guide in teaching him. Following up Karl Groos's 
hint, we should take the child seriously, as he takes himself, 
as poet or dramatist, engineer, surveyor, chemist, astronomer, 
sailor, and should help him to explore as fully as he craves 
those concrete modes of self-assertion. We have seen that the 
boy scout training succeeds on its intellectual side precisely 
because it follows this policy; what is needed is in efEect an 
extension of the same policy throughout the curriculum 
and, with due modification in method, throughout the school 
period. 

The immediate question is, then, what form that policy 
should take as the social outlook of the youth succeeds to the 
individualism of the child and the age for overt making-believe 
is left behind. Our answer is that the pupil's studies should 
be so shaped as to help him to be, in imagination and in anti- 
cipation, a sharer in those phases of human effort which have 
most significance for civilization as a whole. His history and 
geography should look largely towards politics (in the wider 
sense) and economics ; his science should make him a fellow- 
worker with men like Pasteur and the chemists and physicists 
who have transformed the material conditions of life; his 
mathematics should teach him the value of abstract thought 
in relation to the practical afiairs of life, including the 
mechanism of commerce and the financial machinery of civic 
and national government. For teaching given in the spirit 
thus indicated makes as direct an appeal to the play-motive 
in the adolescent as the invitation to make-believe does to 
the child. 

Lastly, the same general argument gives powerful support 
to those who hold that the natural terminus of education is a 
training shaped to fit the young man or woman for some 



88 EDUCATION: DATA AND FIRST PRINCIPLES 

specific role in the great play of life. Here — in " vocational 
education " — the imagination which roamed earlier over the 
whole field of human endeavour is centred upon a chosen plot. 
Interest comes to close grips with the details of actuality, 
and making-believe is present only in so far as the student 
antedates in imagination his entrance into the calling of his 
choice. 

The reader may suppose that, having traced the make- 
believe element from its riotous beginnings in childhood to 
its sober appearance in vocational studies, we have fully ex- 
plored its function in sustaining and facilitating spontaneity. 
The grown man and woman, he may say, have to face the bare 
facts of the world and wrestle with them without the magic 
aid of fancy. Fortunately, nature is not so unkind as that. 
She does not withdraw altogether from the adult the power of 
making-believe with which she protected his tender years. 
A happy blindness of men to present reahty has saved many a 
good cause in times of trouble, has preserved many a charming 
way of life, and prevented many a schemer for the world's good 
from abandoning his labours in despair.^ And while it is 
often good for us to see ourselves as we really are, it may often 
be still better, both for ourselves and for others, that we are 
able to ignore our actual weakness and pettiness, and to take 
a make-believe self as the basis of our plans and actions. 
So subtle and pervasive, as we have said, is the spirit of play. 

NOTES ON BOOKS, ETC. 

Tlio foregoing chapter is an expansion of an article contributed to the 
EdmatiomaL Times of November, 1912. For further references see the 
Notes at the end of Ch. VIII. 

1 A literary instance is Dr. Stockmann in Ibsen's play. An Enemy of the 
People. The character is said by the critics to " depict Ibsen's own position 
towards his countrymen in the matter of Ghosts." 



CHAPTER VIII 

THE " PLAY-WAY " IN EDUCATION 

It is hardly extravagant to say that in the understanding of 
play lies the key to most of the practical problems of educa- 
tion; for play, taken in the narrower sense as a phenomenon 
belonging especially to childhood, shows the creative impulses 
in their clearest, most vigorous and most typical form. Hence 
it is that essentially creative activities, such as art and crafts- 
manship, and, in a smaller measure, geographical exploration 
and scientific discovery, are felt to have a peculiar affinity 
with play and are, in fact, continuous with it in the develop- 
ment of individuality. Even recreative play and relaxation 
are misunderstood if viewed merely as attempts to escape from 
the burden and grind of real life. Whether the player be 
child or man, they express the eternal craving of the organism 
for free self-assertion — a craving that must somehow be fed 
or the soul would die. All truly effective reform, both in 
education and society, is motived by the desire to enlarge 
as much as possible the field in which that central function of 
life may find worthy and satisfying exercise. Its ideal, 
whether held consciously or unconsciously, is always that of 
the mad priest, in John Bull's Other Island, who dreamed of 
"a commonwealth in which work is play and play is life: 
three in one and one in three."! 

The reader will readily see that this ideal is included in our 
concept of individuality as the aim of education. It is no 

1 Quoted by Professor A. N. Whitehead, who commends it as, in particu- 
lar, " the ideal of technical education." See his " Organization of Thought" 
(Williams and Norgate, 1917), p. 30. 

89 



90 EDUCATION I DATA AND FIRST PRINCIPLES 

novelty in pedagogical thought — the theory of Rousseau and 
the practice of Froebel suffice to prove that — but it is at the 
present day affecting as never before the trend of educational 
progress. Among the movements inspired by it more or less 
directly, the one connected with the name of Dr. Maria 
Montessori has attracted, not undeservedly, world-wide 
attention. There is probably in the Montessori " system," 
as in all its predecessors, much that has only secondary im- 
portance and only temporary significance— possibly much that 
will not justify itself before the bar of experience. But these 
things can hardly be true of the cardinal feature of her teach- 
ing : her courageous and resolute attempt to throw upon the 
child as completely as possible the responsibility for his own 
education, and to reduce external interference with his develop- 
ment to a minimum. Man being a social animal, Dr. Montes- 
sori provides that her children shall learn how to live with 
others, to co-operate with them in work and play, to acquire 
social and personal graces. But the most characteristic part of 
her scheme consists in the devices — largely taking the form of 
" didactic apparatus " — by which they are led to teach them- 
selves what infancy and childhood should learn : such as the 
skilled use of their powers of movement and sensory dis- 
crimination, and the elementary arts of reading, writing and 
number. Left to themselves, under the supervision of the 
teacher or ** directrice," to go their own way at their own 
time, to choose their own tasks and to be their own critics, 
the little students acquire, it is claimed, a high degree of 
initiative, self-reliance and power of concentration; they 
learn self-respect at the same time as respect for others, and 
develop a habit of serious, purposeful industry rarely shown 
by children driven abreast along the road of progress in accord- 
ance with the traditional method of class-instruction. 

There is no reason to doubt the justice of these claims. 
Indeed the most cautious observer, if he could pass from a 
class of children recently released from the bondage of the 



THE " PLAY- WAY " IN EDUCATION 91 

older metliod to one that has learnt to use the new freedom, and 
could compare the noisy restlessness and aimless disorder of the 
former with the calm and happy self-guided industry of the 
latter, would find it hard to remain a sceptic. Moreover, there 
is good evidence, not only that children are often under these 
conditions much severer taskmasters to themselves than their 
teachers would dare to be, but also that, in subjects capable 
of objective examination, such as arithmetic, reading, and 
composition, they reach standards at least as high as, and 
generally higher than, those commonly expected of their age.^ 
Although Dr. Montessori repudiates make-believe play, 
together with its literary reflection, the fairy story, the essence 
of her practice may, nevertheless, be described as the play- 
principle erected into a universal method for the education of 
young children. Methods of a similar character, though much 
less thorough-going and more limited in scope, have for years 
been applied to the teaching of older pupils in this country 
and in America. The best known is the '* heuristic method " 
of teaching science which, some twenty years ago, became in 
the hands of Professor H. E. Armstrong a practicable instru- 
ment of instruction and, largely as the result of his advocacy, 
affected powerfully the teaching first of chemistry and physics 
and later of other subjects. Since the professed object of the 
method is to place the student as completely as may be in 
the position of an original investigator, wrestling for know- 
ledge as the man of science wrestles, it is clearly in principle 
a play-method. Dr. M. W. Keatinge, though a severe critic 
of heurism and of the general idea of freedom in education, has 
yet made valuable contributions to the same cause in connec- 
tion with the use of original documents in teaching history .^ 
The use of the " dramatic method " in teaching history, 

1 See the results given by Dr. 0. W. Kimmins in his article "Some 
Recent Montessori Experiments in England" in the Report of the Con- 
ference on New Ideals in Education for 1915. 

a See his " Studies in the Teaching of History" (Black, 1910, pp. 123- 
2 5). The criticisms referred to are in his "Suggestion in Education" 
( Black, 1907) and " Studies in Education" (Black, 1916), ch. vii. 



92 EDUCATION: DATA AND FIRST PRINCIPLES 

geography, English literature, and foreign languages, is a 
still more obvious application of the play-principle.^ 

It may be taken that more recent efforts of the same kir;d 
have generally been influenced by Dr. Montessori as well as by 
the heuristic movement; for besides exploiting to the utmost 
the spontaneity of the individual, they require the teacher 
to renounce his authoritarian position, and to be contented 
to be an " observer," or simply an elder companion of his 
pupils. This is true, for instance, of the methods described 
by Mr. Norman McMunn for " teaching through partnership." 
It is conspicuously true of the methods of teaching the 
English language and literature recently described with much 
vivacity and in full detail by Mr. Caldwell Cook, who shows his 
clear appreciation of the psychological sanction of his proce- 
dure by calling his book " The Play- Way." 

These writers are only prominent members of a rapidly 
growing company of pioneers who are all busily engaged in 
exploring the " play- way " of teaching the several subjects 
of the curriculum. In contrast with their experiments, 
which are concerned primarily with procedure in instruction, 
we must now note another series of essays in revolutionary 
pedagogy, whose significance is rather in relation to school 
government and discipline. Here the chief centre of inspira- 
tion, at least for this country, has been Mr, Homer Lane's 
" Little Commonwealth," which was, in turn, a derivative 
from an American institution widely known as the " George 
Junior Republic." The original citizens of the Little 
Commonwealth were, like their trans-Atlantic prototypes, 
young delinquents, boys and girls of fourteen years and 
upwards, who were handed over to Mr. Lane, under the terms 
of the Children Act (1908), by a discerning and courageous 
magistrate. It is, however, instructive to observe that the 
community, as it grew, came to contain a number of children, 

1 See Edmond Holmes, "What Is and What Might Bo." p. 174. Mr. 
Holmes notes that "Work while yon play and play while you work" 
seems to have been the maxim of his model teacher " Egeria." 



THE " PLAY- WAY " IN EDUCATION 93 

of tender years and innocent of crime, whose presence was 
valued as an important factor in the remedial influence of the 
institution. The prime feature of Mr. Lane's policy was one 
that struck every newly enrolled member of the Commonwealth 
with extreme astonishment — namely, that the citizens were 
subject to no discipline or government which was not of their 
own making and administered entirely by themselves. They 
regulated their affairs with all the freedom and self-responsi- 
bility of a fully emancipated democracy. 

The argument that led up to this startling inversion of the 
usual methods of the ** reformatory school " is clear and 
simple. In Mr. Lane's view, juvenile criminality is due not to a 
perverted nature but to the misdirection of strong impulses 
which, deprived of their normal outlet, are driven to seek 
satisfaction in irregular and anti-social conduct. The remedy 
sanctioned by psychology is not further repression, relentless 
and overwhelming, but " sublimation " ; and this is the remedy 
the Little Commonwealth sought to supply. The young 
incorrigible, the despair of his parents and teachers, perhaps 
the terror of a London slum, found himself on a farm in Dorset- 
shire among busy young people engaged in occupations that 
tempt initiative and give scope to abounding energy. If he 
chose to share their labours he could earn the wages of inde- 
pendence ; if he declined to work he must live on the humiliat- 
ing charity of boys andgirls of his own age and class, and admit 
the justice of their contempt. There was little fun in re- 
bellion against the law, where there was no authority except 
the common will of those who might in former days have been 
members of his own ' gang.' It should not be surprising 
that, in these circumstances, the inveterate truant and idler 
was often transformed into an industrious agriculturist, the 
young outlaw into a convinced supporter of a social order 
he helped to make. 

If freedom and self-responsibility have power thus to 
regenerate characters warped by years of misdoing and mis- 



94 EDUCATION: DATA AND FIRST PRINCIPLES 

handling, why should they not prove equally potent for good 
in the education of all boys and girls ? Responding to the 
suggestive force of this question, many teachers are testing, 
with varying degrees of scientific thoroughness, the possibility 
and value of "self-government" in ordinary schools. The 
account of one such experiment, given by Mr. J. H. Simpson, 
is particularly useful, not only by reason of the clearness and 
candour of his analysis, but also because it shows that the new 
ideas have power to transform even that formidable thing, 
the English public school tradition. As Mr. Simpson points 
out, the so-called self-government of the public schools is far 
from being democratic in the proper sense of the term. It is 
rather, he maintains, a compound of the oligarchic rule of the 
prefects with the t5n'anny of a custom often stupid and un- 
progressive simply because the ordinary boy is given no oppor- 
tunity of exercising his intelligence and initiative in matters 
of real importance. Moreover, the whole social tone is subtly 
vitiated by a subconscious opposition between the authority 
of masters and prefects on the one hand and the rights and 
interests of the commonalty on the other ; whence comes the 
pernicious idea that the maintenance of law, like the exaction 
of work, is the business of external powers WTLOse will it is 
permissible and even a "sporting " thing to frustrate. These 
evils can hardly be removed unless the law of school and class- 
room comes to be the expression of a common will to which 
every boy has an equal right to contribute, and until, corre- 
latively, it is recognized that to make and to administer the 
law is a duty which no one may shirk, but every one must 
share in, to the best of his ability. 

Mr. Simpson, following the practice in the Little Common- 
wealth, sought to fulfil these conditions by setting aside certain 
periods in every week during which his form was resolved 
into a "court" performing the functions of legislation, 
administration and justice under its elected officers. The 
reader must consult his book for an account of the progress 



THE "PLAY- WAY" IN EDUCATION 95 

of the experiment and of the difficulties its course encountered. 
We must set down, however, two conclusions to which hia 
experience seems to point. The first is that it is difficult to 
combine thorough-going self-government with the present 
methods of class-instruction; for these belong integrally to 
the older tradition of school-organization and discipline. 
Self-government and some form of " play- way " in teaching 
are necessary correlatives, the former being itself, in fact, 
the play- way in the region of conduct. The second con- 
clusion is that the larger the share of responsibility we throw 
on to the pupil the more necessary is it that education, as a 
way of spending one's time and energies, should be justified in 
his eyes. Tasks imposed on us by irresistible forces do not 
need this justification. If they prove congenial, so much the 
better; if not, we make the best we can of them. In either 
case we cannot help taking them seriously. But if they are ex- 
pressions of our own free will, we shall take them seriously only 
if, like voluntary play, they seem intrinsically " worth while." 
In the Little Commonwealth this condition was met by 
putting the work on a directly economic basis. Mr. Simpson, 
recognizing the need to which we refer, sought what he calls 
a quasi-economic basis in an ingenious system of corporate 
marks. As we might expect, he does not regard this device 
as finally satisfactory. We must, in fact, agree with him that 
nothing will really meet the case, short of such changes in the 
matter and manner of school teaching as will make it unneces- 
sary to offer bribes to industry, and will place the incentive to 
labour in the labour itself. And such changes must un- 
questionably be looked for in the directions indicated in the 
preceding chapter. 

Connected with these new departures in education are 
two large questions we have reserved for separate discussion. 
The first is the question of school organization; the second 
concerns the functions of the teacher. 



96 EDUCATION: DATA AND FIRST PRINCIPLES 

It is manifest that neither a rigid class-system nor a rigid 
time-table is wholly compatible with the principle that a 
child should travel through the world of learning in his own 
way and at his own time. These institutions embody, in 
fact, the contrary principle; for the assumption underlying 
them is that a school may be divided into groups of learners 
each of which can be treated as a unit moving in a single 
direction at a single rate of progress and transferring its 
interest from subject to subject in obedience to an external 
rule. In the case of the large classes still too common in 
elementary schools, this grotesque assumption has often to be 
taken quite seriously, for nothing else may be possible. In less 
trying cases there is room for compromise ; classes may be sub- 
divided into sections and rearranged for different subjects; 
there are " options " and " sides " and " individual attention " 
for divergents. But although the barbarous simplicity of the 
scheme may thus be tempered, its basis is still the postulate 
that it is the teacher's business to prescribe what shall be 
learnt and how and when it shall be learnt, the pupil's to 
respond as best he can. The " Montessori school," on the 
other hand, accepts the full consequences of the principle 
that the individual pupil is the unit. Life being a social 
business and the school a miniature society, there must be 
certain regularities and certain corporate acts. Apart from 
these, however, there is no fixed time-table and there are no 
classes ; the children go their own way and move freely upon 
their lawful occasions . In the case of older pupils this method, 
too, must admit compromise. There are many times when 
the repetition of necessary instruction would be extremely 
wasteful, and many when corporate teaching has values of 
its own which nothing could replace. Moreover, provision 
must be made for co-operative activities, such as music, 
gardening, field-work, and hand-work, physical and dramatic 
exercises. For work of these kinds there must be fixed times, 
places and organization. But there would remain an un- 



THE "PLAY- WAY" IN EDUCATION 97 

mistakable difference between the general tone and function- 
ing of a system of this kind, and those of one built up on 
the traditional presuppositions. And there is already good 
evidence that such a system is not only practicable, but is 
capable of yielding fruits better than those of the older 
system, even when measured by the older standards. 

Lastly, we turn to the teacher. The reader may have found 
it difficult to see what room is left for a teacher in a scheme of 
things in which each child is to seek his own individuality and 
ensue it. And his perplexity may well be deepened when he 
finds Dr. Montessori insisting that the teacher's one function 
is to be " an observer " and Mr. Lane disclaiming any peda- 
gogical gift except masterly inactivity. Let him observe, then, 
in the first place, that however " natural " the conditions of 
school life may be made, it remains a life lived in a selected 
environment, an artificial microcosm within the macrocosm, 
and that the teachers do the selecting. They set the stage 
and furnish the properties for the play. It follows that even 
though they claim no share in the composition of the drama, 
but merely watch its development with friendly interest, they 
have already settled within certain limits what form the action 
shall take. Thus, though it is true that in a Montessori school 
a child may do what he pleases, yet what he may please to do 
is rigidly and even narrowly limited. He must fit cylinders 
into their appropriate holes, arrange coloured tablets in due 
sequence, learn the rudiments of number from the " long 
stair "; for, as matters are arranged, there is really nothing 
else he can do. In fact, one of the most striking things about 
these schools is the uniformity of the routine. Of all the 
uses to which infantile ingenuity could put the " didactic 
apparatus," those intended by the inventor are the only 
ones actually observable. How does this come about ? 
Ultimately, without question, by the will of the teacher, who 
intends, for instance, that the cylinders shall be used neither 
as nine-pins nor as soldiers, bat solely for cultivating tactile 

7 



98 EDUCATION: DATA AND FIRST PRINCIPLES 

and visual discrimination. This use, discreetly suggested, 
spreads by imitation and becomes fixed in the tradition of the 
school; but behind and safeguarding the tradition there is 
always the abiding will of the teacher. 

It must, further, be understood that, in speaking of the 
teacher as an observer. Dr. Montessori has in view not a merely 
passive onlooker, but an active observer — one who " stands 
by," in the nautical sense of the term, refraining from fussy 
interference, but ready to lend a hand when help is called for. 
She must keep a minute record of each child's progress and, like 
a watchful but restrained mother, must look for the moment 
when a word will be truly in season or a suggestion judicious. 

Similarly, the teacher of older pupils will not cease to be a 
teacher, however resolutely he may abjure the didactic 
attitude. His functions may change in character, but will be 
no whit less important, and will make even greater demands 
upon learning, intelligence and professional cunning. It will 
be his task to create and maintain an environment in which his 
pupil's impulses towards the arts and sciences will be awakened, 
and to shepherd them unobtrusively in the right directions. 
Himself steeped in the best traditions of his subject, he must 
see that, by inspiration, suggestion and criticism, those tradi- 
tions are revealed to the young inquirer, and are allowed to 
make their appeal to him. He will be an " idea-carrier " 
between the great world and the school microcosm, infecting 
his pupils imperceptibly with germs that may fructify into 
ideals of sound workmanship and devoted labour. And, as we 
have already said, organization and corporate instruction, 
though they lose their present obstructive predominance, 
must retain their natural place in the school economy. The 
old pedagogic arts, which represent not merely the blunders of 
the past but also the successes won during centuries of sincere 
and patient effort, can never become obsolete. But purged by 
a surer criticism, they should develop into the better instru- 
ments of a more enlightened purpose. 



THE " PLAY- WAY " IN EDUCATION 99 

Turning from intellectual to moral education, we must 
remark that some enthusiasts for the " new freedom " are 
prone to accept with uncritical readiness the doctrine that 
children are naturally good, in the sense that if they were 
left to themselves moral beauty would unfold in their lives, 
as surely as physical beauty unfolds in the blossoming flower. 
It is a pleasanter doctrine than the one which declares the 
heart of man to be deceitful beyond all things and desper- 
ately wicked, but, like the latter, is rather the expression of a 
temperament than the statement of a fact. There is, however, 
this to be said for Housseau's position as against Jeremiah's: 
good ways of life have in them a promise of growth which bad 
ways may falsely offer but cannot, like the good, fulfil. Good 
activities may lead to indefinite expansion; evil activities, 
though for a while they may flourish like the bay-tree, con- 
tain in themselves the seeds of their own inevitable decay. 
Beings, the deepest need of whose nature is creative expansion, 
must, therefore, on the whole, seek the good and cannot be 
satisfied unless they find it. But the tragic history of the 
human conscience, and the sad story of what man has made of 
man, show how doubtful is the search and how often it ends 
in disaster. While, then, the unperverted impulses of child- 
hood may have a biological bias towards the good, it is too 
much to expect them to solve unaided the problems of life 
which have baffled some of the best-intentioned minds and 
most highly gifted races of mankind. In short, it is dangerous 
to ignore either of two complementary truths: the one ex- 
pressed in Shelley's bitter parody, " Wherever two or three are 
gathered together,the devil is in the midstof them;"the other, 
in Mr. G. K.Chesterton's dictum, that to hold that "salvation, 
like other good things, must not come from outside " is "a 
blunder about the very nature of life."^ 

In the realm of conduct, then, as in the realm of intellect, 
teaching must always have a definite place and essential 

^ " Short History of England," p. 58. 



100 EDUCATION: DATA AND FIRST PRINCIPLES 

functions. Taking first the case of young children, it is 
clear that the teacher's manipulation of the environment is 
not limited to setting the stage for the child's activities and 
providing him with fellow-actors. She, with her superior 
powers and knowledge and her developed personality, is 
herself a constant and most important element in the environ- 
ment, and exercises on the growing minds about her an in- 
fluence that will be none the less decisive because it is brought 
to bear in the indirect form of suggestion and example rather 
than by precept and command. From her, if she is worthy 
of her functions, the children learn in a thousand subtle 
ways the attitudes and tendencies that distinguish the humane 
from the brutal, the civilized from the barbaric habit of life. 
Insensibly but surely her values become their values, her 
standards their standards ; and from her come the influences 
that direct the children's social impulses into definite forms 
of kindly action. 

Similarly, although the teacher of older boys and girls 
may resolutely put away the notion, so seductive to adult 
vanity, that it is his duty to " mould the characters " of his 
pupils as the potter moulds his clay, yet he cannot bind the 
directive influences that flow from the prestige of age, of 
superior knowledge and experience of the world. Even if 
he could he should certainly not do so. His part is not to be 
a roi faineant, but rather to be in his little republic a perpetual 
president, who must exercise the duties of citizenship all the 
more scrupulously and assiduously by reason of the excep- 
tional powers his position gives him. He cannot help regu- 
lating the moral atmosphere of the school or class to a large 
extent by his influence on the pupils' studies and reading. 
And though his young people will generally gain outside 
the school their first acquaintance with the loyalties and 
aspirations that divide and sway the world, yet it is in school 
and under his influence that the issues involved in those 
loyalties and the meaning of those aspirations should become 



THE " PLAY- WAY " IN EDUCATION 101 

clear to them, so that they may make their choice with as 
full a sense of responsibility as their age permits. 

Again, it is undoubtedly a sound principle that the power 
of moral ideas depends, in general, upon their being learnt 
from first-hand experience, and used as guides to one's own 
responsible actions. Here, rather than in some metaphysical 
dogma of natural goodness, is the true sanction for the practice 
of throwing the onus of school-government upon the governed, 
and calling upon them not only to create the law but also to 
deal with offences against it. The principle is so important 
that, rather than sacrifice it, a teacher may justifiably tolerate 
much minor evil, waiting patiently for the spontaneous 
reaction that will generally come when experience reveals its 
unpleasant fruits. But, in addition to the common rights of 
school citizenship which the teacher shares with the taught, 
he has a special responsibility that he cannot repudiate: it 
is his plain duty to see that the fundamental purposes of 
school-life are not frustrated by the corrupting influences of 
a few or the moral weakness of the rest. When danger of this 
kind threatens, and persuasion fails to " rally the good in the 
depths " of the social body, he must act and act decisively. 
There is no inconsistency between this conclusion and the pre- 
ceding argument, provided that the teacher makes clear that 
he acts not as an autocrat resuming rights of interference for a 
while in abeyance, but as the mandatory of a wider society 
to which he and the offending body alike owe allegiance — 
the school as an historic entity transcending its present mem- 
bership, or, in the last resort, the Great Society of which the 
school is, ultimately, an organ. 

The case for self-government in schools is put by some 
strenuous advocates in a form whose consequences it is im- 
portant to face clearly. Starting from the sound position that 
boys and girls can best learn the significance and value of the 
moral order by building it up for themselves, they proceed to 
argue that the process, if it is to be genuine, or at least complete, 



102 EDUCATION: DATA AND FIRST PRINCIPLES 

must start from the beginning. As one of the leaders in the 
new way has said, it is only when young people have had 
the " searching experience " of a moral chaos that the craving 
for something better is powerfully aroused in them. We 
must accept the evidence which has now been offered from 
many quarters that the moral activity thus initiated and 
supported may have the happiest and most striking results 
upon the character of those who share in it. But we are bound 
to ask what happens to those who come after them and find 
the foundations of a decent common life already laid and a 
fair building already erected upon them. Deprived of the 
" searching experience " of moral anarchy, will they not also 
miss the educative experience of fashioning a moral order to 
replace it ? There are uncompromising spirits who do not 
shrink from what seems to be the inevitable answer. They 
agree that as soon as a stable rule of life has been established 
the community has exhausted its usefulness; it must be 
broken up and a fresh start made for the benefit of the next 
generation of citizens. 

Reformers of a less heroic cast may well shrink from 
accepting so drastic a deduction from their principles, and will 
turn back to re-examine the premises from which it follows. 
They will then observe that their intransigent colleague has 
eliminated from his educational scheme one element which 
the world in general holds to be of prime importance — namely, 
the influence of tradition. The methods used in the upbring- 
ing of children have varied widely from age to age, and even 
from one family or school to another at the same epoch ; but 
from the dawn of civilization the elder generation has con- 
ceived its task to be to form the younger generation in the 
tradition in which itself was formed, modified in such direc- 
tions as its experience may have suggested to be desirable. 
Conservative reformers are content to seek improvements 
in the practice based on this ancient faith; our revolu- 
tionaries would have us reject the basis altogether, and build 



THE " PLAY- WAY " IN EDUCATION 103 

education anew on some form of the dogma of natural 
goodness. 

No one who has accepted the interpretations of life set out 
in these pages can be satisfied with such a position . Somehow, 
he will say, the new, well-founded faith in the child's spon- 
taneity must be made to square with the old, equally well- 
founded faith in the value of tradition.^ Our own discussion, 
based upon the results of the previous chapters, has constantly 
assumed such a reconciliation to be possible. The psycho- 
logical grounds for the assumption may become still clearer 
as we proceed. 

NOTES ON BOOKS, ETC. 

Dr. MoNTESSORi has given a cousecutive account of her ideas and their 
applications in two works, "The Montessori Method" and " The Advanced 
Montessori Method" (Heinemann). A brief general account of the Little 
Commonwealth will be found in Clarke Hall, " The State and the Child " 
(Headley, 1917). The citations on pp. 94-5 are from J. H. Simpson, "An 
Adventure in Education" (Sidgwick and Jackson, 1917). N. MacMunn, 
" A Path to Freedom in the School," records the experience of a still earlier 
pioneer, and is a persuasive little work, full of sound criticism of the old 
order. H. Caldwell Cook, " The Play Way " (Heinemann), is a delightful 
essay in the "new teaching" of English. For the Caldecott Community 
see the footnote on p. 75. The Bureau of Educational Experiments (70, 
Fifth Avenue, New York) has issued several useful pamphlets on the 
educational value of play. Sir. R. Baden-Powell's " Scouting for Boys " 
and the official Handbooks for Wolf Cubs and Girl Guides are all published 
by C. A. Pearson. Ltd. The "Order of Woodcraft Chivalry" is a more 
recent movement, based explicitly upon the recapitulation theory of human 
development. Its aims and methods are briefly set out by Margaeet A. 
Westlakb, "The Theory of Woodcraft Chivalry" (published by the Order, 
at 4 Fleet Street, E.C. 4, 1918). 

^ To start afresh from moral chaos may still be necessary as a remedial 
measure to be adopted in the case of " delinquents " whose minds have been 
poisoned by a bad tradition. But even in this case the purpose of the moral 
surgery, properly interpreted, is to establish the conditions under which ^ 
better tradition may have its due efiEecta. 



CHAPTER IX 

NATURE AND NURTURE 

The question just raised has been long and warmly debated 
in a more general form — namely, as the question whether 
" nature " or " nurture," inherited endowment or environ- 
mental influence, has the more potent effect in determining a 
child's development. Upon this issue there are two schools 
of extreme opinion. The one, mainly followers of Francis 
Galton, exalts " nature " so high that " nurture " becomes 
of almost trivial importance; the other, conveniently called 
" neo-Herbartian," maintains almost without qualification 
the cheerful creed of Helvetius : Education pent tout. 

The Galtonians support their position by two main lines of 
argument. In the first place, they say, there is between a 
child's physical and moral qualities so high a degree of corre- 
lation, that it is impossible to suppose them derived from 
difi!erent sources. Since the former are indubitably the work 
of " nature," the latter cannot be produced by " nurture." 
Given that Becky Sharp was born with green eyes, we must 
admit^ that the rest of her deplorable career followed almost 
as a matter of course. 

In the second place, they point to the stubborn facts of 
heredity. Galton presented some of these in a particularly 
arresting form in his nightmare histories of twins who be- 
haved throughout their lives as if they were clockwork 
automata turned out by the same factory and wound up at 

1 As Professor Karl Pearson has somewhere said. 
104 



NATURE AND NURTURE 105 

the same moment. The disquieting inference from these 
chronicles is that we are all driven upon life's course by the 
fatal vis a tergo of our endowment, although, owing to the 
merciful infrequency of twins, most of us are able to dwell in a 
fool's paradise where the depressing fact may be ignored. 
The biometricians have used their statistics ruthlessly to drive 
home the same idea, showing that a man's character is corre- 
lated with his ancestor's as fatally as his stature or his cephalic 
index. And, finally, eugenic research has rooted out the 
appalling history of the Jukes family,^ to clinch the proof that 
the circumstances of life are to man what rocks and winds 
and currents are to a ship : merely accidents that make his 
qualities manifest but have nothing whatever to do with 
producing them. 

Unmoved by the weight of scientific authority behind 
these arguments. Dr. F. H. Hayward, the protagonist of the 
neo-Herbartians, declares boldly that psychical heredity is a 
" spectre " which vanishes as soon as one penetrates beyond 
statistical abstractions to the concrete facts of life. It is 
no longer possible, he admits, to maintain the pure Herbartian 
doctrine that the soul consists in nothing but acquired ideas ; 
it possesses, without doubt, specific inherited tendencies. 
But these tendencies are so plastic that " nurture " can 
make almost anything of them. To be convinced of 
this we need only examine the records of such an 
institution as the Barnardo Homes. For these prove that 
from the most unpromising stock, when it is properly 
manipulated, human material as sound and good as any 
other may be fashioned. 

The opposition between these views is unmistakable, and 
the reader may well think them as completely contrary as 
two theories of the same facts can be. It may seem to him, 

1 Out of about 1,000 persons in five generations, 300 died in infancy; 
310 spent 2,300 years in almshouses; 440 were wrecked by disease; 130 were 
convicted criminals (including 7 murderers); and only 20 learned a trade ! 
See Keatinge, " Studies in Education," p. 27. 



106 EDUCATION: DATA AND FIRST PRINCIPLES 

therefore, perverse to suggest that their unity is, after all, 
more fundamental than their difference, and that the quarrel 
between them is so virulent just because it is a domestic quarrel 
between members of the same family. Yet consideration will 
show that this view is correct. At bottom the Galtonian and 
Herbartian views are both variants of the mechanistic con- 
ception of life. According to the former, if we provide a child 
with a happily selected ancestry it makes comparatively 
little difference how we educate him; according to the latter, if 
we educate him properly his ancestry is of negligible import- 
ance. This contradiction is so striking that it obscures the 
fact that the Galtonians hold that the child's being is deter- 
mined irrevocably by nature no more firmly than the Herbar- 
tians hold that it is fatally moulded by nurture. Upon either 
view we must admit that the potter has power over the clay 
to make one vessel unto honour and another unto dishonour. 
The only alternatives left open are that if we follow Galton 
we shall identify the potter with the blind forces of heredity, 
working pre-natally, while if we prefer Herbart we shall 
discern the potter's work in tlie post-natal influences of 
home and school. 

In distinction from both these views our doctrine asserts 
that the living organism has a principle of autonomy, of self- 
determination, which does not, indeed, make it independent 
of endowment and environment, but does enal)le it to give its 
own characteristic form to, and make its own original use of, 
what it derives from those sources. We have, then, no 
difficulty in admitting both that the fertilized cell with which 
the life of the individual begins contains engrams whose un- 
folding is manifested in its spiritual equally with its physical 
growth, and also that the organism is so much one with its 
physical and spiritual environment that the two cannot be 
separated. For the fundamental truth is, for us, that it 
is a centre of ci-eative energy which uses endowment 
and environment as its medium; so that the elements 



NATURE AND NURTURE 107 

it receives from nature and nurture do not themselves 
make it what it is, except in so far as they are the 
bases of the free activity which is the essential fact of its 
existence. 

Considering, however, the rival doctrines on their merits, 
it seems clear that the Galtonian view underestimates the 
importance of " social heredity," and so tends towards a 
pessimistic view of the possibilities of average humanity. 
Medical psychologists, and other observers whose work 
brought them into intimate contact with the minds of private 
soldiers during the great war, were often struck by the immense 
amount of talent which an unenlightened education and a 
depressing social system have conspired to inhibit (see p. 86). 
And there is good evidence that what is certainly true of our 
own people is also true of many of the " backward peoples." 
For instance, from the fact that the Murray Islanders had no 
words for counting beyond six and could refer to larger 
numbers only in the vaguest way, it seemed a fair inference 
that their nature lacked the conditions of mathematical 
ability. Yet under the ministrations of a Scottish dominie 
their children are said to have developed a virtuosity in arith- 
metic that would have delighted any school inspector of the 
old regime. And as these words are written, comes the striking 
message of Sir Hugh Clifford to the Gold Coast Colony, from 
which one gathers that a most unpromising race is proving 
itself capable of developing, under wise guidance, adminis- 
trative gifts and industrial aptitudes commonly thought to 
be confined to the higher peoples. 

On the other hand, the too easy optimism of the neo- 
Herbartians leads them to underestimate the differences in 
general and specific capacity that limit the possibilities of 
individuals with adamantine rigour. Inspired by a worthy 
but rather crude belief in the " power of ideas," they think 
of the soul as an artefact that may be fashioned, by a suffi- 
ciently skilful treatment, in accordance with almost any pre- 



108 EDUCATION: DATA AND FIRST PRINCIPLES 

conceived plan. Writers of this school are, therefore, only 
consistent in treating with marked coolness the idea that to 
cultivate individuality is the proper aim of education .^ Their 
attitude, which minimizes the influence of native capacity, 
would, if translated into practice, lead to much educational 
waste. Dr. Keatinge illustrates this point by an extreme but 
apposite case: ** The influence in a school of a good musical 
teacher upon a number of only moderately gifted pupils will, 
in succeeding generations, prove to be almost negligible from 
every standpoint in comparison with the influence upon the 
society of their time, of a family of, say, four or five musical 
children, who have been brought up in musical surroundings, 
have drunk in traditions of music with every pore, and go 
forth into the world ready to promote musical interests, and 
in turn to found families in which this particular art will be 
cultivated with zeal,"^ 

Accepting, as we must, the position that variations in 
native capacity cannot be ignored, we must next inquire what 
forms they take and how they can be estimated. Here we 
enter upon one of the most important chapters of recent psycho- 
logy. The first episode centres round the attempt of the late 
Alfred Binet to determine a " metric scale of intelligence." 
The starting-point of his researches was a problem of painful 
interest to administrators in most great cities — namely, to 

^ There is, we may remark, some risk of confounding two things which 
may be distinguished as social and individual education. No one can 
question that persistent educational pressiu-e may alter the whole intellectual 
and spiritual orientation of a people. The modern transformation of 
Japan is usually quoted as the leading case, though Mr. Benjamin Kidd 
may be right in declaring the " Prussianization of Germany" — effected 
in a generation very largely by the influence of the schools — to be the most 
important instance. Kidd may also be right in maintaining that if the 
schools worked together in the proper direction they might, in twenty-five 
years, purge Euro^ie of some of the worst evils that have desolated its history. 
But this permeation of a society by certain ideas, although enormously 
important, is but the beginning of education as we conceive it; for it is, after 
all, only the provision of an environment. The arguments in favour of 
leaving the individual to make his own use of the environment come subse- 
quently into play, and still retain all their force. 
2 " Studies in Education," p. 43. 



NATURE AND NURTURE 109 

determine whether the backwardness that so often makes it 
impossible for a child to keep pace with others of the same age 
is, in a given case, due to mental defect or merely to unfavour- 
able conditions, such as constant removal from school to 
school. Binet began with the hypothesis that every child 
has a definite fund of native capacity or intelligence that 
would carry him, even if he received no teaching, a certain 
distance forward during each of the formative years of life. 
There is, for example, a time in the life of each child at which 
he has " picked up " the facts that he has eyes, ears and a 
nose ; a time when he knows the names and order of the days 
of the week ; a time when he can carry in his head instructions 
of a certain complexity; a time when he can disentangle the 
right conclusion from the data of a certain kind of argument, 
and can see through a certain kind of fallacy; and so on. 
The psychologist sought, by examining a large number of 
young Parisians, to determine which of such non-scholastic 
accomplishments belong, on the average, to the several years 
of childhood. The list, once compiled, was to serve as a 
metric scale for fixing the " mental age " of any child to whom 
it was applied. Thus, if a child, born ten years ago, could just 
pass the tests of the tenth group, his " mental " would be 
deemed identical with his " chronological " age; if he failed 
to deal with those beyond the eighth group, his mental 
age would be judged to be eight — i.e., two years behind his 
chronological age. It remained only to decide what degree 
of retardation of the mental behind the chronological age 
made it impracticable to teach a child together with his 
coevals, and warranted his removal to a special school. Binet 
ultimately adopted as his criterion a retardation of three 
years. 

It is impossible to follow here the development of this 
interesting enterprise of the " new psychology." Binet's 
scheme offered several openings for criticisms: for example, 
(i.) the allocation of tests to the different years, which, being 



no EDUCATION: DATA AND FIEST PRINCIPLES 

based on the achievements of the Paris gamin, were hardly 
likely to be paralleled exactly by those of his representatives 
in other cultures and climes; (ii.) the mode of deciding the 
mental age of a child who fails in some of the tests of a given 
year yet passes in others assigned to a later year; (iii.) the 
estimation of mental defect. On the first point, the tendency 
has been to drop the tests of knowledge and rely on the tests 
of faculty! which have a wider validity. As regards (ii.), 
the present tendency is to assign " points " or marks to the 
tests, and to fix the mental age in terms of the sum-total 
obtained by the candidate. In the estimation of backward- 
ness the greatest improvement has been made by Mr. Cyril 
Burt, whose contributions to the subject of mental tests have 
great value. Burt found, by the examination of a large num- 
ber of London school-children, that the *' standard deviation " 
of the mental age is always normally about one-tenth of the 
chronological age, while, in the case of mentally deficient 
children, it is about four and a half times as great. He 
proposes, therefore, to use the standard deviation as 
the unit in measuring divergencies above or below the 
normal .2 

^ The power to count backwards is, for those who have not practised 
the exercise, a simple test of faculty. Another is to deal with such questions 
as the following (which the author has borrowed from Dr. P. B. Ballard): 
" Captain Cook made three voyages round the world. In one of his voyages 
he was killed and eaten by savages. In which voyage did that happen ?" 
Such tests demand, of course, a certain minimum of knowledge, but the 
essential requirement is a synthetic power in which minds of low develop- 
ment will be defective. 

2 There are two ways of measuring the variation hi mental age among 
the children of a group who have the same chronological age. One is to 
take the several differences between the mental ages and the common 
chronological age, to add them together, and to divide by the number of 
children. The number thus obtained is called the "mean deviation" of 
the mental ages of the group. The other way is to square the differences, 
to add the squares, to divide the sum by the number of children, and to take 
the square root of the quotient. This gives the "root-mean-square" or 
" standard" deviation. Tlie former method is arithmetically simpler, but 
the latter is, for technical reasons, generally to be preferred. 

The reader may note in passing that Burt's interesting discovery contra- 
dicts the view, cherished by many teachers and sometimes preached by 



NATURE AND NURTURE 111 

Binet and his followers have generally assumed, explicitly 
or implicitly, that they were dealing in their tests with a single 
kind of native capacity, "general intelligence" or "educa- 
tional ability," which may show itself most prominently in 
different directions in different children, but is essentially 
one thing in all its various manifestations. The second phase 
in the history of our topic consists of the researches whose 
express purpose has been to test that assumption. 

Professor C. Spearman, whose work upon this problem is of 
outstanding importance, has classified the competing views 
on the nature of intellectual ability into " non-focal," " multi- 
focal," and " uni-focal." Upon the non-focal view — of which 
Professor Thorndike was once the leading representative — 
a man's mind is a bundle of numerous and totally unrelated 
capacities. That means that from a man's ability to do one 
kind of thing well one can draw no inference about his ability 
to do another kind of thing; one must simply wait and see. 
The multi-focal view, to which Thorndike has now transferred 
his allegiance, holds that our abilities fall into a small number 
of groups. If it were true, we could infer from a man's ability 
to do one thing well that he could also do a certain number of 
other things well, but could make no inference with regard 
to performance beyond the purview of the group to which these 
belong. The common idea that a person may be clever at 
languages, and yet have no head for mathematics, is a popular 
rendering of this view. According to the uni-focal theory, all 
forms of intellectual ability are related; there is a common 
element running through them, in virtue of which inference 
from one to another is always possible. This is clearly the 
assumption involved in the practice of choosing public officials 

inspectors, that the result of good teaching should be to minimize the differ- 
ences between the more and the less able members of a class; for it shows 
that divergence in ability produces, as indeed one might expect, a differ- 
ence which is proportional to the length of time it has been acting. One 
has here another argument for treating the individual as the unit of 
instruction. 



112 EDUCATION: DATA AND FIKST PRINCIPLES 

by competitive examination in " general " or " academic " 
subjects. Needing young men of sufficient ability to ad- 
minister the Indian Empire or the home service, we select 
those who, under the conditions of the examination-room, 
turn out the best set of Greek verses or solve the greatest 
number of differential equations, and send them to the East 
or to Whitehall, confident that those who have shown the 
highest abihty in the one direction will prove to be most able 
also in the other. The same belief is the keystone of Carlyle's 
argument in the " Heroes." 

Spearman himself holds the third view, and has defended 
it with great ability in a series of highly important memoirs. 
His methods are too technical for these pages, but the general 
nature of the argument may be understood from the following 
explanation. 

Let us suppose a very large group of persons to be tested 
and to receive marks for ability in a number of directions 
that have no obvious connection with one another. (The 
ability to add up figures rapidly, and the ability to tell which 
of two notes has the higher pitch, would be examples fulfilling 
this condition.) Suppose further that the marks are so 
assigned that performances of equal merit in the several tests 
always receive the same marks, and that the mean mark given 
is 50 per cent. Then three results are a priori possible, 
(i.) The faculties involved in the several tests may, though 
they look very different, be really the same. In that case, 
apart from accident, a person's marks in all the tests would 
be the same; if he earned, say 80 or 10 per cent, in the first, 
he would earn 80 or 10 per cent, in all. (ii.) The faculties may 
be as different as they appear. In that case there will be no 
congruity between the positions of the same person in the 
different tests. It follows that if we select from the whole 
group those who earn more than 50 per cent, in the first test, 
their average mark in any other test will be exactly 50; for 
their superior ability as a body is confined to the first test, and 



NATURE AND NURTURE 113 

implies neither superiority nor inferiority in another, 
(iii.) The situation may be intermediate between these ex- 
tremes. A person's skill in the several tests may depend in 
part upon a common faculty which is brought into play in 
every performance, and in part upon specific faculties that 
come into action in one only. In that case, the results will 
depend upon the relative importance of the common and the 
specific faculties in a given test. Let us suppose that in the 
first test a person's position depends chiefly upon the amount 
he possesses of the common faculty. Then the persons who 
gain more than 50 marks in the first test will have in any other 
test an average mark above 50. For however important the 
specific faculty may be that comes into play in the second 
test, those persons will, as a body, have an average amount of 
it, while they more than have an average amount of the 
common faculty. 

By an elaborate application of this kind of reasoning, 
Professor Spearman claims that he has placed beyond doubt 
the truth of the unifocal theory — that is, that there is running 
through all forms of intellectual ability a " central intellective 
factor " which is everywhere one and the same, although it 
is combined in action with different local factors that are 
specific to the several forms of ability. It must, however, 
be said that the validity of the reasoning has, quite recently, 
been acutely questioned by Dr. Godfrey Thomson, who, 
while neither denying nor affirming the unifocal theory, 
maintains that it is not established by the experimental 
facts upon which Spearman relies. 

At the present moment, then, that theory must be regarded 
as still suh judice. It may well be that, as so often happens 
in the history of science, the simple idea it presents may have 
to be qualified. Meanwhile, its substantial truth seems 
constantly to be confirmed by results which are not easily 
interpreted on any other basis. By far the most striking 
are the results of the " mental tests " applied during the Great 

8 



114 EDUCATION: DATA AND FIEST PEINCIPLES 

War to about a million and a half recruits in the American 
Army. The object of the tests was to select promptly the 
men whose superior mental powers marked them out for 
employment in special posts or specially important organiza- 
tions, to eliminate those whose inferiority would make them 
a hindrance or a danger to their fellows, and to make it possible 
to equalize the mental strength of units, such as infantry 
companies, which were intended to work together. Each 
recruit was required to answer, by underlining, crossing out 
or checking, a paper of 212 questions. The process took 
only fifty minutes, and could be applied at one time to groups 
as large as 500.^ 

The verdicts of the mental tests were compared in some 
thousands of instances with the judgments of officers who had 
the same men under observation under conditions specially 
favourable for assessing their military value. The results 
of the comparison are most impressive; for they show that 
in a great majority of cases the predictions of the psychologist, 
based upon a fifty minutes' test, were fully confirmed by the 
subsequent behaviour of the men in the vastly different 
circumstances of the camp and the training school. 

This large-scale experiment cannot fail to stimulate other 
attempts to use mental tests for the rapid discrimination of 
ability. They have for some years been employed, here and 
there in this country, as an ancillary means of selecting 
scholars for promotion at public expense to secondary schools. 
More recently they have been used with typical Teutonic 

^ In addition to simple arithmetical problems and exercises in checking 
opposites (e.g., lax— strict, assert — maintain) the questions tested the power 
to discriminate good reasons from bad (e.g., leather is used for shoes because 
(i.) it is produced in all countries, (ii.) it wears well, (iii.) it is an animal pro- 
duct), and the power to carry out instructions under more or less compli- 
cated conditions {e.g., " If 5 is more than 3, cross out the number 4 in the 
given row of figures unless 4 is more than 6, in which case draw a line under 
the number 5"). 

Illiterates and foreigners took tests in which the instructions were 
conveyed by pantomime and demonstration. Those who failed were 
examined individually; by tests of the Binet type. 



NATURE AND NURTURE 115 

thoroughness and rigour to pick out boys capable of projfiting 
by an "intensive course " at a school for higher talents in 
Berlin. And it is now understood that the authorities of 
Columbia University, recognizing that success in a pass 
examination of the academic type is an inadequate guarantee 
of the ability needed to make good use of a higher education, 
will henceforward require their candidates to submit to 
mental tests before matriculation. 

Scarcely less significant are the numerous attempts now 
being made to discriminate individual ability for work in- 
volving a definite group of specific factors. It is understood 
that these " vocational tests " have been used in the British 
Army in the selection of air-pilots, and they are rapidly finding 
their way into the world of industry, particularly in America. 
An interesting, though rather complicated, example is offered 
by the ingenious procedure devised by Hugo Miinsterberg 
of Harvard for selecting men whose psychological make-up 
fitted them for employment as drivers of electric street-cars. 
The candidate was required to turn a crank so as to cause a 
narrow window to run along a card, which was to be taken as 
representing a street. The card was marked out in half- 
inch squares and was ruled with a couple of heavy lines, half 
an inch apart, to represent rails. Certain squares were 
occupied by figures: 1 standing for a pedestrian, 2 for a 
horse-vehicle, 3 for an automobile. Differences of colour 
indicated whether the occupant of a square was to be taken 
as moving parallel to or across the track, and there were 
conventions with regard to the speed — a horse being supposed 
to travel twice, an automobile three times, as fast as a pedes- 
trian. The point of the test was to discover whether, as the 
movement of the window brought the figures rapidly into 
view, the man could react promptly to their significance — 
stopping the crank in good time when che position, value 
and colour of a figure indicated an imminent collision, turning 
on serenely when, in accordance with the conventions, there 



116 EDUCATION: DATA AND FIRST PRINCIPLES 

was no danger. Experienced motor-men reported that the 
test demanded the same kind of adjustments of attention, 
and the same readiness of discrimination as actual driving in 
a crowded street, and stirred up the same tendencies to 
hesitation and fluster. Moreover, Miinsterberg found that 
a classification of the motor-men on the basis of their success 
in the test agreed well with the classification furnished by 
the railway company. Thus it would appear that the test 
was really capable of distinguishing those who had in them 
the makings of good motor-men from those who were pre- 
destined to failure, through lack of the requisite psychological 
equipment. 

It is evident that there should be important scope in the 
field of education for both general ability tests and vocational 
tests. It may, however, be asked whether the antithesis 
between them is theoretically sound; that is, whether voca- 
tional fitness does not largely depend on the presence of other 
elements — for instance, moral elements — that are just as 
general in their functions as Spearman's central intellective 
factor. The psychologists have not missed that question. For 
example. Dr. E. Webb, a pupil of Professor Spearman, has 
inquired what psychological factors in a man, as distinguished 
from the actual qualities, good or bad,of his actions, determine 
the judgments which others pass upon his character. For 
this purpose, he obtained a number of assessments of the 
mental qualities of about 200 training college students. 
The assessors were mainly fellow-students holding responsible 
positions in the social body, and their judgments were given 
under thirty-nine heads, ranging from emotional qualities, 
such as tendencies to cheerfulness or anger, to intellectual 
qualities, such as common-sense and originality. From a 
statistical analysis of the results, conducted as in Spearman's 
researches, Webb concluded (i.) that judgments of character 
rest on a basis independent of the central intellective 
factor {g), and (ii.) that this basis is, or includes a second 



NATURE AND NURTURE 117 

central factor (w) which may be shortly described as " the 
persistence of motives." 

Quite recently Mr. J. C. Maxwell Garnett, working over 
the same data, has brought to light a third independent 
factor which is closely related to humour and originality, 
and is called by its investigator " cleverness " (c). As he 
points out in his brilliant but recondite paper, high values 
of c distinguish the artists and poets and other men of genius 
from the scientific journeymen and plodding philosophers 
whose achievements presuppose only a high value of g. 
And he makes the ingenious suggestion that the general 
nature of a person's endowment may be registered by a 
single point in a tri-dimensional record or graph, the co- 
ordinates of the point being the values of the three independent 
factors described by Spearman, Webb and himself. 

These fascinating researches are in a field that admittedly 
needs further exploration. It is, however, tempting to think 
that the factors g, c and w may be fundamental characters 
of all hormic activity, unconscious and conscious. Their 
values, symbolized by Mr. Garnett's graphic point, would be 
in a special sense diagnostic of the promise and potency of 
the individual, so far as these depend on his endowment. 
They would have a much deeper significance than any 
specific factors, though the latter have, too, a bearing, as yet 
imperfectly realized, on human efficiency and happiness. 

If these speculations should prove to be well-founded, the 
importance of good teaching will be not a whit diminished. 
On the contrary, improvement in the assessment and classifi- 
cation of abilities should be a challenge to improvement in the 
types of training provided to develop their possibilities. 
Moreover, the abilities brought to light by psychological 
tests are, as a rule, only abstract in character ; the tests do not 
tell us what a child will aspire to do or to be, but only predict 
certain formal features of his activity. What he will aspire 
to do and be is determined, subject to the principle of 



118 EDUCATION: DATA AND FIRST PRINCIPLES 

autonomy which is the ultimate arbiter, by other natural 
tendencies of a more concrete nature. One of these is the 
general tendency to imitation, which we shall at once 
proceed to study. The other is the tendency to follow 
certain specific lines of activity — a tendency which we 
shall subsequently consider under the heading of instinct. 



NOTES ON BOOKS, ETC. 

M. W. Keatinqe, "Studies in Education," chaps, ii., iii. (Black, 
1016), contains a useful discussion of the influence of "nature," friendly 
to the Galtonian view. The view is put forth, in an uncompromising form, 
in C. Goring, "The English Convict" (published, with a Preface by Karl 
Pearson, by H.M. Stationery Office, 1919). The opposite side is most 
vigorously chaminoned in F. II. Hayvvard, " Education and the Heredity 
Spectre" (Watts, 1908). B. Kidd, "The Science of Power" (Methuen, 1918) 
is an eloquent but somewhat unscientific plea for the same view. A con- 
venient summary of the literature of mental tests is given in R. R. Rusk, 
"Experimental Education" (Longmans, new ed. 1919); G. M. Whipple, 
"Manual of Mental and Physical Tests" (Warwick and York, 1910) is the 
standard technical treatise on the subject. H. Binet's pioneer work is 
most conveniently studied in his book, " Les Idees modernes sur les Enfants" 
(Flammarion, 1910); the latest phase of the tests is described in L. M. 
Terman, "The Measurement of Intelligence" (Harrap, 1919). C. Burt, 
" Three Preliminary Memoranda on the Distribution and Relations of Edu- 
cational Abilities" (P. S. King, 1916), contains the survej' mentioned on 
p. 110. Spearman's numerous researches are summarized in an article, 
C. Spearman and B. Hart, " General Ability, its Existence and Nature" 
{Brit. Journ. of Psych., vol. v., pt. 1, March, 1912); Webb's are given in full 
in E. Webb, "Character and Intelligence" (Camb. Univ. Press, 1915). 
The important papers by J. C. M. Garnett and G. H. Thomson are both 
printed in the Brit. Journ. of Psych., vol. ix., parts 3 and 4, May, 1919 
(Camb. Univ. Press). Spearman's reply to Thomson will appear shortly in 
the same journal. H. Mu?jsterbekg's experiments are quoted from 
his "Psychology and Industrial Efficiency" (Houghton Mifflin Co., 1913), 
A pamphlet by C. S. Myers, "Present-Day Applications of Psychology" 
(Methuen, 1918), gives a simple and attractive sketch of the vocational and 
industrial applications of psychology. The Berlin experiment mentioned 
on p. 115 is described fully by G. Wolff in the Pddagogische Zeitiivg for 
February 2Sth, 1918. 



CHAPTER X 

IMITATION 

Imitation is to be understood here as the general tendency- 
shown by an individual to take over from others their modes 
of action, feeling and thought. It ranges widely through the 
animal kingdom, and its effects are so subtly interwoven with 
those of specific heredity that the two are hard to disentangle. 
The present tendency is to give more weight than formerly 
to imitation. For instance, in accounting for the resemblances 
in material and social culture so often found between widely 
severed communities, present-day anthropologists appeal to 
imitative " culture-spread " rather than to " evolution " 
based upon similarity in endowment .1 And it seems that 
even among lower animals the rule of imitation has been 
underestimated. Young chicks and pheasants are often 
first set pecking and drinking by the example of their seniors 
or more adventurous companions, and jungle pheasants and 
young ostriches are said to perish of hunger in the absence of 
this natural stimulus to pecking, or of such a colourable copy 
of it as an experimenter can give by tapping with a pencil. 

As the foregoing examples indicate, imitation appears at 
all levels of conscious activity. The behaviour of the chick 
in learning to peck or drink illustrates what Professor Lloyd 
Morgan calls " biological " or ** instinctive " imitation. This 
is the lowest level. At the highest level we have " reflective " 
or deliberate imitation, of which the regeneration of Japan 
offers, perhaps, the most grandiose example in history. In 

1 ,Sd3 W. H. R. Rivers, " The Ethnological Analysis of Culture " 
(R'lporb of British Assooiation for 1911, p. 490J. 

119 



120 EDUCATION: DATA AND FIRST PRINCIPLES 

human behaviour the two types pass into one another by 
insensible gradations. Let us consider a simple instance. 
A little girl, released with her comrades from lessons, runs if 
they run, and joins in chasing and being chased just as a young 
dog would do in comparable circumstances. This is biological 
imitation, pure and simple, involving no trace or only a 
minimum of deliberation. If her special friend, who has 
learnt the art of " tripping," breaks into that mode of pro- 
gression, she will be sure, sooner or later, to copy the move- 
ment, reproducing it at first clumsily, but in time with ease and 
grace. Here there is an element of deliberation ; for tripping, 
though a simple variant of running, is not in the same sense a 
natural movement, and cannot be imitated without a certain 
amount of attention to its details. Now, suppose the child, 
a year or two older, to see her elders skipping with a rope. 
If she, too, is to become a skipper, as she certainly will, she 
must give more attention than in the last case to the pattern 
or " idea " of the movement; for it is at once moie artificial 
and more complicated. This is still more necessary when, at 
a later age, she takes part, say, in a figure-dance in which an 
elaborate scheme of movements is to be carried out by a 
group of performers. To apprehend the pattern of the dance, 
to retain it in mind, and to translate into continuous and nicely 
adjusted action the part assigned to her, will demand the 
intelligent exercise of intellectual powers as well as mastery 
of the constituent movements. Biological has here passed 
unmistakably into reflective imitation. 

We have now material for observations on two important 
points. The first is the relation of imitative behaviour to 
endowment, the second its relation to " original " behaviour. 

It is evident that in strictly biological imitation the action 
imitated is simply a stimulus which releases in the imitator 
a train of activity already prepared. A chick standing in 
water would not for the first time drink when it sees its mother 
drink, a child for the first time seeing another run would not 



IMITATION 121 

run, unless the engram-complexes involved in drinking or in 
running were already established in the disposition. As 
imitation rises towards the reflective level this statement 
must be modified. There is, for instance, no innate engram- 
complex waiting to be released in the form of skipping; 
skipping must be learnt. At most there is an innate disposi- 
tion to be interested in behaviour of this kind, to be attracted 
to it as a mode of self-assertion. Nevertheless, all the elements 
of the artificial movement are rooted in nature. What happens 
in learning to skip is that these elements are brought into 
relations to which nothing in the original engram-complexes 
corresponds. Our remarks upon one of Thorndike's experi- 
ments (p. 45) will help us here. The child, faced by a situa- 
tion that impels to action, will be urged to a number of move- 
ments, more or less relevant, from which, by trial and error, 
the proper sequence will eventually be selected. Once 
selected, it becomes fixed and perfected by " consolidation " 
(p. 4G). But there is in this case a factor absent from the 
behaviour of Thorndike's imprisoned cats — the child's power 
to apprehend the pattern or idea of another's action and use 
it as a guide for her own. That power consists in the child's 
ability, first, to apprehend the elements of the pattern as 
corresponding to actions she can already perform, and, 
secondly, to apprehend the elements in their relations as 
forming a significant whole.^ The pattern having been 
apprehended, the child strives to set up between the move- 
ments of which, by hypothesis, she is already mistress, 
relations corresponding to those they have in the model. 
This can be done only by trial and error, the process being 
constantly checked by comparison with the action imitated, 

^ Animals have both these powers, but in a much lower degree. They 
can discriinifiate or pick out elements in a complex, and they can synthesize 
or recognize unity in diversity; for these accomplishments are involved 
in all response, whether instinctive or intelligent, to changes in the environ- 
ment. But the range of their discrimination is limited, and their power of 
synthesis more so ; and they cannot, except the more intelligent ones and in 
simple cases, carry a pattern "in the head." 



122 EDUCATION: DATA AND FIRST PRINCIPLES 

and guided by the applause of the onlookers. In this way 
an engram-complex is finally set up which makes skipping 
practically automatic. Later this complex may itself function 
as an element in a still more complicated movement — for 
example, a skipping dance; or may furnish organized com- 
ponents — such as rhythmic leaping — to an action that does 
not involve it as a whole. 

The connection between imitation and " originality " 
has the greatest importance for education. Teachers of a 
modern tendency sometimes discourage imitation on the 
ground that it " cramps self-expression." This is a mistake. 
The most original minds find themselves only in playing the 
sedulous ape to others who have gone before them along 
the same path of self-assertion. In his earlier works we cannot 
distinguish even the voice of Shakespeare from the voices of 
his contemporaries. Imitation, at first biological, then 
reflective, is, in fact, but the first stage in the creation of 
individuality, and the richer the scope for imitation the richer 
the developed individuality will be. Some corollaries to this 
truth are obvious; for instance, that children should be 
introduced through books to a wider and better company 
than they will meet in actual life. Others require more 
emphasis. There is a positive danger in the current idea that 
individual teaching requires as its correlative small groups of 
pupils. On the contrary, the more store we set on letting 
the child go his own way, the more desirable it is to widen 
the field for imitation. Clever and enterprising children 
help the duller and less adventurous to discover their own 
powers by showing them what can be done, and by awakening 
emulation. The group should, then, be as large as possible,^ 
subject to the condition that the teacher is not driven to use 
the authoritarian methods that quench the tendency to imitate. 

1 In the case of young children, at any rate, there is much to be said for 
a "vertical" classitication into parallel groups, each of which contains chil- 
dren of difierent ages. See Miss Blackburn's paper in the Report for 1916 
of tile Conference on New Ideals in Education, p. 206. 



IMITATION 123 

This condition is vital. Any attempt to compel imitation 
tends to defeat its end by provoking an attitude of resistance 
or indifference — a fact which explains the failure of many 
well-meant efforts to make young people admire the proper 
things in literature, art and conduct. We must add that 
this " contrariant " attitude, which is a protest of the indivi- 
dual against infringement of his autonomy, will be maintained 
with special stubbornness towards any teacher who is foolish 
enough to claim, consciously or subconsciously, to be accepted 
as himself (or herself) a model for imitation. 

We commenced this chapter by saying that imitation 
shows itself in action, feeling and thought. These factors of 
conscious life are so closely bound up with one another that 
imitation, beginning in one, commonly spreads to the others. 
Thus, among girls, imitation of an admired mistress, which 
may begin with copying her handwriting, her turns of speech 
and her coiffure, often ends in a wholesale adoption of her 
sentiments and opinions. The admirer tends to become like 
the model, so to speak, all through. Anything that obstructs 
imitation in respect of one of the factors tends to hinder it 
in the others. We do not usually adopt the accent or dress 
of a person we dislike, or feel moved by the joys or sorrows 
of one whose opinions on important matters clash with our 
own. Thus it is difficult to say whether the difference in 
speech between different social classes is more a cause or a 
consequence of the divergence between their interests; in 
either case it is a formidable barrier between them.^ The 
elementary schools can help the cause of social solidarity in 
no more practical way than by working to raise the standard 
of speech among their pupils, so that we may become a people 
who have at least the first requirement for mutual under- 
standing — a common language.^ 

1 Bernard Shaw's play " Pygmalion " is a sermon on this text. 

2 This argument does not point to the suppression of regional dialects 
where they have form and vigour as well as being racy of the soil. On the 
contrary, a common love for a native accent and idiom may often be a 
powerful bond between social classes. 



124 EDUCATION: DATA AND FIEST PEINCIPLES 

In so far as imitation affects feeling it leads to " fellow- 
feeling " or sympathy in the strict meaning of the word. 
Here it does its most important work, for feeling, as we shall 
later see, is the prime mover of thought and action. Much 
has been written on this theme, especially by certain French 
authors under the title " the psychology of the crowd." It is 
community of feeling that converts a mob of unrelated 
individuals into a body moved by a single will, and capable 
of heights of heroism and depths of villainy to which few of 
its members, acting alone, could rise or fall. The demagogue 
and the electioneering agent base their tactics on the 
psychology of the crowd, as does the newspaper man who 
can make a million readers follow his political gyrations 
without the lenst awareness of inconsistency. The fellow- 
feeling that makes these things possible is the foundation 
of all esprit de corps, whether in a nation, an army, or a 
school. 

The spread of feeling starts, like all imitation, from the 
prestige of outstanding individuals, generally persons of 
simple and strong emotions, like Garibaldi or the late Lord 
Kitchener. These " leaders of the crowd " crop up wherever 
two or three are gathered together, and are to be found in 
every school and class. Every teacher must meet them, 
either as friends or as foes. Where the conditions of work 
and government are healthy, the natural leaders of the group 
will generally be friends of the constitution, and are in that 
case its most useful upholders. But conditions are not always 
healthy; and even where they are, malignancy may lurk, 
an inheritance from less happy days. In such a case the 
teacher should deem it an important matter to discern who 
are the natural leaders — for they are not always visible to 
the eye — and, if possible, to capture their loyalty and interest. 
Where they are obstinately intractable there is only one safe 
policy left. He must suppress the enemies of peace, vi et 
armis. But let him be sure of his ground before he strikes, 



IMITATION 125 

and above all, remember that the weakest thing to do is to 
attack an insignificant follower and let the real leader of 
revolt go unscathed. 

It is an obvious corollary that no school group can be in a 
healthy moral condition where there is lack of community of 
feeling between teacher and papils. To secure it the teacher 
must preserve within his adult being a genuine sympathy with 
the tastes and enthusiasms of youth. It is not enough to 
affect such a sympathy; for no weakness is more unerringly 
detected than insincerity in feeling, and nothing leads so 
surely to distrust and aversion. The person, however 
much devoted to the work of education, who finds 
that nature has withheld from him this gift of perpetual 
youth, should transfer his labour to another corner of the 
vineyard. 

Feeling-spread is almost wholly biological imitation. 
Some actors, it is true, aver that by throwing themselves into a 
part they can deliberately create within themselves the emo- 
tions they outwardly portray ; and it is certainly often possible, 
in moments of agitation, to acquire something of the coolness 
of another by imitating his calm demeanour.^ But these 
facts merely mean that biological imitation of a feeling is 
facilitated by action congruent, and hindered by action incon- 
gruent with it. Speaking generally, we catch from others, 
without reflection, their gaiety, their enthusiasm, their terror, 
or their depression. In thought, however, as in physical move- 
ment, both types of imitation are common. Any attempt to 
understand a statement or an argument, as in following an 
historical description or in learning a proposition in geometry, 
may be regarded as a case of reflective imitation ; for the essence 

^ According to the celebrated " James-Lange theory," an emotion is 
only the " bac kwash "from external and internal movements ; " we feel sorry 
because we cry, angry because we strike, afraid because we tremble." 
If the theory were true, reflective imitation of feeling would be comparatively 
common and easy. Most psychologists, however, regard James's view as 
greatly exaggerated. 



126 EDUCATION: DATA AND FIRST PRINCIPLES 

of the process is that one seeks deliberately to see through the 
eyes or think the thoughts of another. The imitation is 
biological, when the adoption of another's ideas is unwilled; 
and this is generally called suggestion. Suggestion was first 
studied by the hypnotists ; for one of the chief marks of the 
hypnotic state is that the subject accepts readily almost any 
idea that is offered to him. It was afterwards found to be a 
common factor of normal life, and has been made the subject 
of numerous experimental investigations. The following 
experiment is typical of the work initiated in this department 
by Binet. 

The present writer recently interviewed, one by one, a 
number of boys and girls of ten, and, in the course of a friendly 
conversation, showed each one a postcard-photograph of a 
yacht sailing alone on Lake Geneva. After a child had 
examined the card for thirty seconds, a number of questions 
about it were addressed to him, among them the question : 
" Was the steamer going in the same direction as the yacht 
or in the opposite direction ?" Only one or two children out 
of about twenty wholly rejected the suggestion contained in 
these words, and declared bluntly that they had seen 
no steamer; some showed signs of disturbance, as if 
ashamed at their carelessness in perception or their lack of 
memory; some gave a hesitating answer; but quite a 
number specified with apparent confidence the direction 
in which the supposititious steamer was moving. 

Whatever the full interpretation of such phenomena maybe, 
they throw an interesting light on the suggestibility of children 
when questioned by an adult, especially by one whom they 
do not know or to whom they are in the habit of deferring. 
They have an obvious bearing on the practice of class-question- 
ing, and on the value of evidence extracted from children 
either in connection with school crimes or in a court of law.^ 

^ There is now a considerable literature dealing from the legal stand- 
point with the suggestibility of children and adults. 



IMITATION 127 

It is more important to notice the influence of suggestion in 
causing the spread and maintaining the vitality of public 
rumours. To illustrate that influence we need only recall the 
instance — which must for ever be classical — of the mythical 
80,000 Eussian troops to whose presence in Great Britain 
during the autumn of 1914 thousands of honest people 
gave convincing testimony. No case could bring out 
more clearly the intimacy of connection between suggestion 
and feeling; the wish was indubitably the father of the 
thought. 

Candid consideration of the facts will show that, apart 
from such abnormalities as rumour, suggestion plays an im- 
mense part in the intellectual life of us all. By what other 
agency could we account, for example, for the geographical 
distribution of religious beliefs and distinctive political faiths ? 
The fact that convictions upon such matters have frontier- 
lines almost as clear as those of States does not prove that 
" reason " plays no part in their maintenance. But it does 
prove that, with regard to the things that have most power 
at once to divide men and to unite them, the function of reason 
as we find it actually at work is not so much to discover truth, 
as to clarify, confirm and explore some faith of our fathers 
which we have received by suggestion. The great Burke, 
who " chose his side like a fanatic and defended it like a 
philosopher," only followed in a grand manner the common 
habit of mankind. 

It would be a profound error, then, to look upon suggesti- 
bility as nothing but a deplorable weakness in human nature. 
Like the routine-tendency and the play-tendency, it is a 
biological device of the greatest utility in both individual 
and social life. Without question, man's ultimate aim 
should be to order all his affairs, from the lowest to 
the highest, in the cold, clear light of reason. But life 
cannot be suspended until that ideal has been realized; 
and by suggestion the people obtain meanwhile at least 



128 EDUCATION: DATA AND FIRST PRINCIPLES 

the partial vision without which in literal truth they would 
perish. 

These considerations will help a teacher to decide one of 
the thorniest questions of professional ethics — namely, the use 
he should make of suggestion. Let him note, in the first place, 
that he can no more prevent himself from acting on his pupils 
by suggestion than he can make himself invisible as he per- 
ambulates the classroom. In the second place, let him remem- 
ber that suggestion is not by nature a foe to spontaneity, 
but a necessary instrument in the process by which a man 
becomes truly the captain of his own soul. From the former 
truth it follows that the teacher is as much entitled to in- 
fluence his pupils by suggestion as they are to influence one 
another, provided he does not deliberately impose such in- 
fluence upon them, but simply puts his superior knowledge 
and experience of life into the common stock from which the 
growing minds of his little community may draw each what it 
needs. From the second truth we deduce that the teacher's 
suggestive power, so far as it can be controlled, should aim 
at building up gradually the critical truth-seeking habit, 
without which man, though born to be free, would remain 
everywhere in chains. With this end in view the teacher is 
not only entitled but bound to use suggestion, either directly 
in his personal teaching, or indirectly through the medium 
of well-chosen books, as the best means of revealing the ideals 
of reason. 

Do these principles suffice to determine the teacher's 
proper attitude towards debatable questions of faith, morals 
and politics ? We reply that they not only permit but require 
him to see that no child shall lose, through lack of opportunity, 
the inspiration of ideals sanctioned by the best and widest 
experience of mankind. They indicate, further, that with boys 
and girls who have reached the storm and stress of adolescence, 
free discussion of these matters, whenever they naturally arise, 
is the best prophylactic against unhealthy suggestion — ^the 



IMITATION 129 

suggestion that is propagated in passion and prejudice, and 
fructifies where ignorance is artificially maintained and honest 
inquiry is stifled. By means of such debates, connected in a 
serious spirit, tolerantly, and so that each view is fairly pre- 
sented, young minds can most safely discover those deepest 
impulses of their nature upon whose guidance they must 
ultimately rely. 



NOTES ON BOOKS, ETC. 

A sound aud broad treatment of imitation is given in W. Mitchell, 
"Structure and Growth of the Mind" (Macmillan, 1907). For biological 
imitation see 0. Lloyd Morgan's delightful "Animal Behaviour" (Ed. 
Araold, 2nd ed., 1915). M. W. Keatinge's valuable book, "Suggestion 
in Education" (Black, 1907), includes an account of Binet's experiments. 
G. Le Box, "The Crowd" (English trans, published by Fisher Unwin), 
is a popular treatise which must be road with caution, more scientific and 
"Human Nature in Politics" (Constable, 1908), is a Graham Wallas, 
highly instructive study of the social functions of imitation. Recent work 
on the topics of this chapter has largely followed the treatment in W. 
MoDougall, " Social Psychology " (see p. 139). McDotjgall's views have 
been lately discussed by B. Hart, "The Methods of Psychotherapy" 
(Proc. of Roy. Soc. of Medicine, vol. xii., 1918), and in a valuable paper by 
E. Prideaux on "Suggestion and Suggestibility" read to the Medical 
Section of the British Psychological Society on October 28th, 1919. 



CHAPTER XI 

INSTINCT 

We must now inquire what is the origin of the activities into 
which the child is born and which he is destined to make his 
own. Is the rich life of the modern world merely the long 
result of imitation modified by the free creative efEorts of 
each generation ? Or are there, apart from imitation, forces 
in human nature which determine fixed lines along which 
our activities must flow and which even free creation must 
follow ? 

There are facts which indicate that the second of these 
questions, rather than the first, suggests the true state of the 
case. We have spoken of them already as facts of racial 
mneme (p. 38), and have quoted maternal care as an example 
of them. A mother in nurturing her child follows the habits 
of her people and her time, and those habits vary greatly from 
race to race, from class to class, from age to age; but no one 
could think that imitation of other women is the complete 
key to her behaviour. The reader will readily find other 
instances of the same sort, where the agent obeys an inner 
imperative with which imitation has nothing to do, except 
that it supplies the garments with which the activity is clothed. 
Is it, then, possible that what is undeniably true of some is 
true of all our activities, and that their bewildering variety 
is but the ever-changing disguise assumed by impulses whose 
aims are, at bottom, everywhere the same ? If so, it is 
clearly important for education to know what these persistent 
types of self-assertion are ; for unless we know them we cannot 

130 



INSTINCT 131 

give intelligent assistance to Nature, and may often be found 
fighting against her. 

At this point, if anywhere, it should be profitable to seek 
help from the " biological view " of human life. Adult 
activities are so complicated that they may easily defy direct 
analysis, and the behaviour of children is soon so much in- 
fluenced by imitation of their elders that deductions based on 
it may be misleading. But the higher animals, such as the 
dog and the ape, lead lives that are in many respects simpli- 
fied models of our own, and there is no doubt that a large part 
of their behaviour can be analyzed into a moderate number 
of modes of self-assertion, persistent not merely during the life 
of the single animal, but through countless generations. We 
are familiar with them under the name " instincts." It 
is at least reasonable, therefore, to inquire whether we have 
not carried those modes of behaviour, or some of them, 
upward with us in the course of our evolution, and whether 
they are not still the basis of our complex existence. 

In following up this idea we must not be misled by the 
associations of the term " instinct." Most people in thinking 
of instinct have in view the often marvellous ways in which 
animals perform complicated acts they have never learnt for 
the attainment of ends they are incapable of foreseeing or 
understanding. Creatures, such as insects, whose lives are 
ruled by instincts of this kind, are wonderfully well equipped 
to m.eet the normal problems of their lives, but display what 
the great observer Fabre has called " abysmal stupidity " 
when faced with any emergency for which the routine of the 
instinct does not provide. That is why instinctive behaviour 
is commonly regarded as " mechanical," " blind," and the 
extreme opposite to "intelligent" behaviour; animals, 
it is said, are guided by instinct, man by reason. Now a 
thorough-going misogynist could make out a case for applying 
the adjectives "mechanical," "blind," "unintelligent," 
even to human mother-instinct, though all healthy- minded 



132 EDUCATION: DATA AND FIRST PRINCIPLES 

people would see that such a description would grossly mis- 
represent the facts as a whole . But t o take up the misogynist 's 
challenge on this side would be to wander from the point. 
The real question is whether the behaviour of the human 
mother is historically continuous with animal mother- 
behaviour ; whether the two are, as a biologist might say, not 
only "analogous" but also "homologous" — that is, alike 
in origin as well as in function. To that question there is only 
one reasonable answer. The basis of mother-behaviour in 
women is, without doubt, a racial engram-complex which has 
been handed down the human line from our pre-human 
ancestors. The complex has, of course, undergone many 
modifications on the way, but there is at least an important 
core of identity between its present state in human endow- 
ment and its state when we were on the same biological level 
as the higher animals and behaved as they do. 

What is that core of identity, and what is the general nature 
of the modifications it has undergone ? To the first question 
we reply that the central factor in mother-behaviour, whether 
in women or in the higher animals, is the " tender emotion " 
which is evoked by the presence of the helpless young and 
issues in acts of protection and devotion. It follows that in 
rising from the pre-human to the human level, we must have 
retained in our endowment the mnemic basis of this emotion, 
with its tendency to be awakened by objects of this kind and 
to flow out in actions of this character. The answer to the 
second question is that the mnemic basis has in its evolution 
lost certain elements which, upon the animal level, restricted 
the field of mother-behaviour and confined it to a relatively 
fixed routine. We must beware here of injustice to our 
humbler sisters. The not uncommon occurrence of " happy 
families " shows that the tenderness of an animal mother is 
not necessarily limited to the fruit of her own womb ; and there 
are credible stories that prove that her protective actions 
may sometimes travel far beyond the bounds of a fixed 



INSTINCT 133 

routine. It is plain, however, that parental impulses in man- 
kind are capable of developments enormously wider and 
richer than animals can ever reach. " Tender emotion " in 
women or in men — for women have no monopoly of the 
gift — may be awakened by the helplessness of children — for 
example, little factory drudges — .whom they have never seen, 
and may issue in results so far from nature as Acts of Parlia- 
ment and State administration. The important point is that 
such developments, however remote, are, to repeat the phrase, 
historically continuous with primitive parental behaviour, 
and are intelligible only if we keep in view the tender emotion 
which runs like a clue through the whole series of phenomena, 
pre-human and human, individual and social, which connects 
them with their origin. 

Thus we reach the notion of instinct which has been so 
brilliantly developed and illustrated by Professor W. 
McDougall in his " Social Psychology." As he has said in a 
later work,^ an instinct is, in his view, an innate conjunction 
between an afiective disposition and one or more cognitive 
dispositions. By an affective disposition he means what we 
should call a complex whose stimulation gives rise to a state 
of feeling issuing in acts directed towards some definite end; 
by a cognitive disposition, a complex whose activity is shown 
in the agent's awareness of, and attention to, a particular 
kind of object or event; by innate conjunction, the fact that 
those complexes are parts of a functional whole in the agent's 
endowment. In some instincts the feeling aroused by the 
object or situation is a well-defined emotion, such as anger or 
fear; in others it has less individual distinctness; but in all 
cases it is the mainspring of the agent's behaviour. Instinc- 
tive behaviour conforms to this scheme in men and animals 
alike; but there is the great difference that in animals it is 
relatively fixed and stable in form throughout the agent's 

1 "Instinct and Emotion," Proceedings of the AriHoidian Society, 
19U-15,p. 25. 



134 EDUCATION: DATA AND FIRST PRINCIPLES 

life, while in men it is capable of endless variety and progress 
on both the cognitive and the affective sides. It is in this 
variety and this progressive development that the phenomena 
of intelligence or reason make their appearance. That is to 
say, intelligent behaviour is not a specific variety to be 
distinguished from instinctive, but is instinctive behaviour 
itself in its higher levels; no longer " mechanical " or fixed 
in form, but indefinitely plastic; no longer "blind" but 
illuminated with purpose.^ 

These points are easily illustrated. Pugnacity is an 
example of the instincts in which the feeling-element is a 
definite emotion — here the emotion of anger. Speaking 
generally, anger is awakened by something that threatens to 
obstruct the agent's self-assertion, and issues in acts tending 
to break down that obstruction. In an animal the occasions 
of anger are easily foreseen, for the impulses to self-assertion 
are limited in variety; and the acts to which the emotion 
gives rise are of a relatively fixed and predictable character. 
It is pretty certain, for instance, that a hungry dog will be 
angered if another one tries to capture his bone and that his 
anger will issue in furious biting. A very young child will 
behave in an almost equally predictable way if an imprudent 
nurse snatches a treasure from his hands. But the occasions 

^ In a recent most interesting article on "Why is the 'Unconscious ' 
Unconscious" (Brit. Journ. of Psych., vol. ix., pt. 2), Dr. W. H. R. Rivers 
tends to rehabilitate the old distinction between instinct and intelligence. He 
connects them respectively with the nervous mechanisms involved in what 
Dr. Head calls " protopathic " and "epicritic" sensibility — of which the 
former has, no doubt, much the greater biological antiquity. Since, how- 
ever. Rivers does not claim that the " instinctive " mechanisms are function- 
less in normal human life, but expressly maintains that the "intelligent" 
systems have taken up into themselves whatever in the older systems is 
useful — whatever is useless or harmful being relegated to the " unconscious " 
— his view does not seem, after all, to be necessarily in conflict with 
McDougall's. For the " useful " parts which are retained from the instinctive 
systems may still give to the several intelligent systems their special char- 
acters, and so preserve substantial continuity between the primitive and 
the modern forms of behaviour. And, as a matter of fact, the parts re- 
tained include the nervous structures that are most active in emotional 
experience. 



INSTINCT 135 

of the dog's anger and the acts to which it leads will remain 
much the same throughout his life. You would not expect 
the most intelligent dog to be angered by an epigram or to 
organize a canine conspiracy for his foe's downfall. The 
child, on the other hand, will grow into a man whose wrath 
may blaze out at a tale of ancient wrong, or be deeply stirred 
by an imputation upon the originality of his poems, and may 
be expressed through twenty years of political agitation or 
by a scandalous portrait of his critic in his next novel. 

In contrast with pugnacity, we may take the collecting 
instinct as one in which the feeling-element lacks the dis- 
tinctness of an emotion. This instinct is notoriously shared 
by squirrels (for instance) and schoolboys. Nature bids 
the squirrel collect nuts, and prescribes a regular routine to be 
followed in gathering and hiding them. She lays a similar 
imperative upon the schoolboy, but leaves his impulses open 
to the seductions of postage-stamps, cigarette-cards, or 
regimental badges, or free to follow any other fashion of the 
moment. The instinct thus fed in youth may develop along 
the same lines and appear in the grown man as a passion for 
collecting engravings, first editions or historic relics; or it 
may deviate from its original direction and make him a miser, 
a " grangeriser " or a collector of anecdotes about royalty. 
The acts by which the collecting impulse seeks satisfaction 
show a correspondingly wide range. The small boy wheedles 
his treasures out of his father's friends ; the rich connoisseur 
has his agents in every European capital. 

McDougall's concept of instinct has not escaped criticism. 
For instance, Mr. A. F. Shand contends that fear in animals 
is not linked with a single conative disposition, but may, 
according to circumstances, issue in flight, in concealment, 
in " shamming dead," or in other distinctive ways. He 
maintains, therefore, that there is no one instinct with fear as 
its central element, but a group of separate instincts organized 
in a system dominated by that emotion. To this criticism 



136 EDUCATION: DATA AND FIEST PEINCIPLES 

McDougall replies that what Shand regards as a group of 
instincts within an emotional system is really a " chain- 
instinct "• — that is, the movements of flight, concealment 
and the rest are successive stages in the unrolling of a 
single affective disposition. 

We are not called upon to take sides in this controversy 
between two psychologists who have both done signal service 
to the subject. It is evident that Shand, in confining the term 
** instinct " to a definite system of innately organized bodily 
movements, is influenced by the orthodox biological tradition, 
and that McDougall, on the other hand, is anxious to preserve, 
perhaps at too great a cost, the architectural simplicity of 
his scheme. But for our purpose the important thing is their 
agreement that human behaviour follows lines of organization 
which make it historically, or biologically, continuous with 
animal behaviour, and, in particular, that in man the emo- 
tional feelings are the " foundations of character." 

More recently Dr. James Drever, while endorsing on the 
whole Dr. McDougall's views, has questioned the primacy 
of the emotions in instinct. Normally, he holds, the feeling 
aroused by a stimulus that appeals to an instinct is an 
*' interest " or feeling of " worth- whileness," and the emotion 
comes upon the scene only if the activity which is the natural 
outcome of the interest is obstructed. The criticism is valu- 
able, and accords in part with our general position. There is 
a danger lest McDougall's scheme, too rigidly maintained, 
should land us back in a quasi-mechanistic theory, leading 
us to think of a man's self as built up of instincts much as a 
machine is built up of wheels or a wheel of molecules. We 
must insist that the organism comes before the instincts, and 
that these are but special organs of self-assertion that have 
developed during its racial history. They are, as it were, 
local differentiations of the general life-activity, which have 
become established in the organism in virtue of their biological 
utility, both as means of self-maintenance and as instruments 



INSTINCT 137 

of creative expansion. From this standpoint we may look 
upon the emotions as local differentiations of the feeling that 
colours all the organism's conative dealings with its world. 

Drever, however, makes between " instinct-interest " and 
emotion a cleaner distinction than this view warrants. It is 
true that in solving a scientific problem or in repaying a good 
turn I am not swept along all the time on a full stream of 
wonder or gratitude. Nevertheless, the " worth- whileness " 
experienced in such activities does seem in each case to be 
coloured, so to speak, with the same colour as the emotion. 
In short, it is a special variety of the general feeling of self- 
activity which from time to time during the course of the 
activity may either rise to, or fall from, the individual distinct- 
ness of the emotion. Much the same account may be given of 
the " appetites," such as those of hunger and sex, which differ 
from the instincts in so far as they originate in states of the 
body, and make use of external objects only in order to reach 
their appointed ends. Hunger, for example, may rise con- 
tinuously from a vague readiness for a meal to an almost 
insupportable craving. 

As with the emotions, so with cognition and action. In 
instinct, we are told, the perception of a specific kind of object 
leads, through the awakening of a specific emotion, to a specific 
form of active behaviour. But the instinctive perception of 
the object is only a local differentiation or intensification 
of the organism's general power to be aware of its en- 
vironment ; and the specific movements, however wonderfully 
organized, are only a local differentiation of its general motile 
power. The instincts doubtless mark out the lines along which 
both cognitive and motile power have mainly advanced, but 
the organism, in its creative moments, may use the results of 
that advance for ends beyond the purview of any of the special 
instincts. This happens, for instance, in play, where the 
appetite for life, the lust for self-assertion as such, may employ 
the whole range of the instincts (p. 73). It happens also in 



138 EDUCATION: DATA AND FIRST PRINCIPLES 

the " disinterested " activities of science and art. In science 
man's self-assertion seeks a purely intellectual control over 
nature (p. JOJ), and will not rest until he has penetrated her 
secrets from the stellar system to the electron, has recovered 
the vanished beginnings of things, and can foresee " what the 
world will be when the years have died away." So in the 
arts and crafts, disinterested self-assertion through movement 
aims at surrounding life with the " significant forms " of 
beauty .1 

In short, life as a whole, may, with little extravagance, 
be regarded as the unrolling of an instinct in which the 
activities of the special instincts are only characteristic 
moments. For it is a continuous, unified process of self- 
assertion in which a disposition to action is linked, through 
the intermediacy of feeling, to a disposition to cognize the 
external world. Moreover, the general life-feeling has a 
specially close connection with emotions into which, from time 
to time, it is intensified. These are what McDougall speaks 
of as " positive self-feeling," the feeling of exaltation we 
experience when things go markedly well with us and we 
are "superior to the situation," and the complementary 
"negative self-feeling," or feeling of abasement, that comes 
when self-assertion is bafiied or inhibited. 

However much Dr. McDougall's scheme must be qualified 
in detail, its three cardinal tenets can hardly be disputed, 
(i.) The emotions and their kindred states of feeling are cer- 
tainly the prime movers of human activity ; if they ceased to 
act, the whole fabric of individual and social life would speedily 
decay, (ii.) They are without doubt connected indissolubly 

^ Professor Graham Wallas, in his admirable book "The Great Society" 
(ch. X.), also contends that we have impulses to know that transcend the 
limits of McDougall's instincts. For him "Thought is a true natural dis- 
position" — i.e., an instinct, which "may be independently stimulated" 
and not " a merely subordinate mechanism acting only in obedience to the 
previous stimulation of one of the simpler instincts." This view, while lead- 
ing to much the same results as ours, differs from it by making " Thought " 
itself an instinct side by side with those which McDougall recognizes, 



INSTINCT 139 

with specific types of activity of essential importance in the 
growth of the individual and in the maintenance of society, 
(iii.) The forms of these activities are capable, in man, of 
indefinite development and inter-relations without losing 
their historical identity. The bearing of these truths upon 
educational practice is as clear as it is important. The com- 
parative fruitlessness of so much educational efiort is mainly 
due to neglect of the feelings which are the proximate sources 
of human energy, the real springs of educational progress 
whether in learning or in conduct -^ and where there is not only 
neglect but repression, the harm done may, as we have seen 
(pp. 55-6), reach the dimensions of a disaster. It is, then, 
plainly necessary that we should study with some care the rule 
of feeling in the evolution of individuality. 

NOTES ON BOOKS, ETC. 

W. McDouGALL, "An Introduction to Social Psychology" (Metliuen, 
9th ed., 1915), is the fountain-head of most of the applications of the idea 
of instinct in education, sociology, etc., and may justly be called a clast^ic. 
Important discussions by leading psychologists, biologists and philosophers, 
largely centring round McDougall's definition, are in the British Journal 
of Pxycholofjy, vols. iii. (1910) and x. (1919) and in the Proceedings oj the 
Aristotelian Society for 1914-15. C. Lloyd Morgan, "Instinct and 
E.'^perience" (Methuen, 1912), by one of the first biological authorities on 
instinct, is a delightful treatise on the main points raised in the earliest of 
these discussions. James Drever, "The Instinct in Man" (Cambridge 
University Press, 1917), is a valuable review of the subject, in the main 
confirmatory of McDougall's views. A very able exposition of a different 
point of view, substantially that of William James, is given inE. L. Thorn- 
dike, "Educational Psychology," vol. i. (Columbia University, 1913). 

^ Dr. Koatinge ("Studies in Education," ch. iv.) claims a high place 
for aesthetic subjects, on the ground that they give scope to the emotions. 
We object only to the implication that such scope need not be provided else- 
where. On the contrary, a chief defect in current teaching in such subjects 
as mathematics and science is precisely its lack of appeal to the proper kinds 
of feeling. See the chapter on Science in Adams' "The New Teaching" 
(Hodder and Stoughton, 1918). 



CHAPTER XII 

THE GROWTH OF THE SELF 

Jack, aged seven, visiting for the first time a large town, is 
taken for a ride in an electric tram-car. He is immensely 
intrigued by the wonderful doings of the conductor and the 
driver, and his pertinent but unhappily-timed questions 
cause his mother no little embarrassment. The journey 
over and tea disposed of, he begins at once to live again through 
the afternoon's experiences. The drawing-room becomes a 
tram-car, his mother and complaisant aunts the passengers. 
He, of course, is conductor, but, in the absence of a play-mate, 
doubles his part and also serves the motor. Armed with a 
bag for pouch and a table-gong for bell-punch, he collects 
fares, issues carefully perforated tickets, stops and restarts 
the car, and occasionally, in his secondary capacity, rushes 
to the brake and sounds the alarm to trespassers on the rails. 
In the full tide of his importance he is carried away, indignant 
and protesting, to bath and bed. 

For two or three days, perhaps. Jack is, in the main, a 
tram-man. Then there flashes upon his vision the glory of 
being a horse-guard, protecting in shining armour the entrance 
to the Park ; or a milkman going his rounds with churns and 
barrow; or a clergyman conducting a christening; and the one 
time tram-man becomes a guardsman, a milkman, a clergy- 
man, and so on indefinitely. 

Let us consider this familiar tale in the light of the preceding 
chapter. The first thing to note is that it begins with an 
appeal to a definite instinct — the instinct of curiosity. But 

140 



THE GROWTH OF THE SELF 141 

the tram-man, the guardsman and the rest do not come 
before Jack merely as trivial novelties attracting a moment's 
attention. They have an impressive quality which, though 
not so overmastering as to reduce him to impotence and 
evoke fear, or the high degree of negative self-feeling we have 
called " abasement," is yet pronounced enough to challenge 
a readjustment of his being to something that cannot be 
dismissed or ignored. The play that follows is his reply to 
the challenge. It is the positive phase of behaviour which 
follows and completes the preceding negative phase, and is 
supported by positive self-feeling that may rise, at moments 
of outstanding achievement, to the level of " exaltation." 

We must next observe that as long as Jack's self -feeling 
is set, say, towards tram-conducting, all the other instinctive 
and emotional tendencies, so far as they are relevant, take 
their cue from it. "Acquisitiveness" specializes, for the 
time, in tram-tickets; "experimentation" (*' constructive- 
ness ") serves only the business of the hour; anger rises 
promptly to answer interference with that business, but lets 
other occasions go; grief clings to failure in it, or fixes its gaze 
on lost opportunities; desire urges, and hope looks forward 
to its renewal. 

This kind of play might be described as experimental self- 
building ; for it differs from the serious business of self -building 
only in the relative instability of its results. During the age 
of making-believe, self-assertion, like a wandering compass- 
needle, points, now this way now that, attended in its veerings 
by the positive and negative self-feelings, and carrying with 
it the other emotional tendencies, all of which, for the time 
being, make its objects their own. In a dozen years. Jack, 
who at seven was everything by turns and nothing long, will 
have entered, say, upon his promising career as an electrical 
engineer. He has long been indifferent to the seductions of 
tram-conducting or the milk-trade, and is content to let others 
make their fame, unchallenged, in the Army or the Church. 



142 EDUCATION: DATA AND FIRST PRINCIPLES 

His self-assertion has taken up permanently the direction 
of electrical engineering, and is not to be diverted from it 
except in holiday moments. But beyond the fact that it is 
committed to a specific line of growth, there is, in principle, 
no difference between Jack's self at twenty and his experi- 
mental selves at seven. The cardinal feature still remains — • 
namely, that the energy of his instinctive or emotional life 
flows, for the greater part, along the direction given to it by 
the " set " of his self-assertion. The impulses rooted in 
curiosity and the " experimenting " tendency serve mainly 
this dominant interest, and become organized into scientific 
knowledge and technical skill ; while those that belong to the 
self-feelings, to anger and to the other primary and secondary 
emotions, conspire with them to feed the main current of 
Jack's development. Ere long the youth's very bearing and 
dress will, to an experienced eye, betray the electrical 
engineer, and he will with difficulty conceal his profession 
during an hour's conversation with a stranger. 

It is now clear that the growth of the self may be described 
as a process in which the impulses that have their roots in 
instinct and appetite become organized into a permanent 
hormic system (p. 30), wielding imperial authority within the 
organism; or as the building up of a great engram-complex 
around the emotions and appetites, and the dispositions to 
knowledge and action which belong to them and derive their 
energy from them. Like all complexes, the self-complex 
must be thought of not statically but dynamically (pp. 47-8). 
It is the relatively permanent basis of the agent's individuality 
as this is expressed in a unified system of thought, feeling and 
action ; but it is constantly modified by the results of its own 
activity (p. 44), and constantly becomes, by consolidation 
(p. 46), a more coherent, definitely shaped structure, sub- 
serving a higher degree of expressiveness (p. 31). 

It is this great complex whose growth and activities are 
brought out by the insight of a good biographer or pictured 



THE GROWTH OF THE SELF 143 

by the imagination of a great novelist. We cannot attempt 
to unravel all its complexities, but, adopting the masterly 
analysis of Mr. A. F. Shand, we may profitably note that it 
is largely built up of certain massive sub-complexes of a 
typical character whose activities are sentiments. The reader 
will understand the technical meaning Shand gives to this 
word if he will reconsider Jack the tram-man, and recall how, 
for a while, all the passions of his being were gathered up into 
the pursuit of a single object. If that state had proved 
permanent instead of transient, we might have said that a 
" sentiment " for tram-conducting had become established as 
a constituent of Jack's self. In short, a sentiment is not a 
single state of feeling, but a system of feelings — that is, of 
emotions, appetites and desires — organized with reference to 
a particular object, and having a considerable degree of 
stability. 

The pleasant vice of puffing tobacco-smoke afiords a 
simple instance of a sentiment. The basis of smoking is a 
group of bodily appetites which only psycho-analysis, perhaps, 
could trace to their origins; but round these low-grade 
impulses there may grow up an emotional structure capable 
of raising a sensual habit to the dignity of a social function — 
even of a ritual in which womanhood savours its hardly won 
freedom I L'homme moyen sensuel looks forward eagerly to 
his smoke, curses the lack of tobacco or matches which robs 
him of it, seeks to prolong the pleasures of fruition, takes 
pride in his expert judgment of brands and pipes, and at times 
" knows love's sad satiety," followed in due course by a 
blissful return of appetite. All these things are marks of 
a genuine sentiment. Mutato nomine, they may also be said 
of the normal woman's attitude towards dress — a matter on 
which discerning philosophers have written with the gravity 
due to its importance. Here again is a sentiment which, 
arising from a humble need of the body, draws into its empire 
a wide range of emotions, and gives exercise to high powers 



144 EDUCATION: DATA AND FIRST PRINCIPLES 

of aesthetic judgment and practical skill. It may sometimes 
serve unworthy ends, but only a dull or prejudiced critic could 
belittle the spiritual heights to which it may attain ; a generous 
observer will see how important a part a gifted woman's 
dress-sentiment may play in developing a gracious indi- 
viduality, and will thankfully appreciate the value it adds 
to social life. 

These two sentiments are both examples of love — ^the love 
of smoking and the love of dress. As such they illustrate 
Shand's weighty point that a love is not a single emotion, but 
a system embracing a manifold of feelings, which arise, replace 
one another, disappear and return, in accordance with the 
varying phases of the agent's relations with the beloved object. 
In antithesis with the loves we must set the hates. These, 
too, are sentiments, and — though the fact is at first surprising 
— involve no emotional element that may not also appear in 
the loves. To hate smoking, for instance, is, like loving it, 
to feel pleasure, displeasure, regret, relief, hope, disappoint- 
ment, and so on; the feelings are the same, only the occasions 
are difierent. Love delights in the presence of its object and 
strives after fuller and richer intercourse with it; hate finds 
it an offence, and seeks to destroy it, or at least to avoid its 
presence. 

It is an ancient and profound truth that education should 
teach men to love and to hate the right things ; but the aphor- 
ism must not lead us into the error of supposing that love 
and hate are of co-ordinate value. A love, since it urges one to 
explore and develop the riches of its object, is a principle of 
growth, of expansion; a hate, since its aim is to destroy 
relations with its object, is, so far, doomed to sterility. Hate 
is fruitful only when made to subserve a love, by eliminating 
hindrances to its growth or purging it of elements that deface 
its nobility. Thus the " patriotism " whose core is the hatred 
of other nations is a poor and fruitless thing, but hatred of 
the deeds that stain our country's history is the obverse of 



THE GROWTH OF THE SELF 145 

a noble regard for her honour. Similarly— to compare a 
smaller thing with a greater — hatred of " sloppiness " and 
inexactitude is a necessary element in every type of " scholar- 
ship." 

We conclude that the central duty of school teaching is to 
encourage loves, and that it should use hates only as the 
gardener uses his pruning knife to remove the rank growth 
that wastes the sap of the tree, and spoils its beauty. It 
follows also that the first step in teaching any subject should 
be to lay the firm foundations of a love, by so presenting it as 
to tempt the pupil to a joyous pursuit. If this step be well 
taken and wisely followed up, there is no need to eliminate 
the drudgery inseparable from any subject worth serious 
study. The course of true love never did run smooth, because 
it never could; for only difficulty, disappointment and hope 
deferred can evoke the energy that makes a genuine senti- 
ment. 

From this digression let us return to Jack, and seek to 
fiJl up some of the gaps in his psychological history. 

About the inner life of a baby nothing can be directly 
known; we can only observe and interpret his behaviour 
much as we observe and interpret the behaviour of animals. 
There is, however, no doubt that in the earliest months one 
of the strongest constituents of the self is established — the 
sentiment or group of allied sentiments that grows up around 
the primitive bodily appetites and the pleasures and pains 
of the physiological functions. According to the psycho- 
analysts the early history of these sentiments has profound 
significance for later years; for it does much to determine 
whether the child will be yielding or obstinate in temper, 
whether he will become an " extrovert " finding his business 
in outward things, or an " introvert " concerned mainly with 
his own feelings and thoughts. And ages before Freud it 
was recognized that the sentiments connected with bodily 
satisfactions have the greatest importance for character, 

10 



146 EDUCATION: DATA AND FIRST PRINCIPLES 

whether they develop into the self-indulgence of the volup- 
tuary or the asceticism of the saint. 

Next, gradually separating itself from the sentiments of 
the body, the mother-sentiment appears, to be followed, longo 
intervallo, by the father-sentiment. There now arises a 
situation which, if we are to believe Freud, deserves, far more 
than any situation of adult life, to be called " the eternal 
triangle." However much we may discount Freud's gruesome 
theory of the " (Edipus-complex," there is no question that 
Jack will acquire from his relations with his parents — and, 
to a smaller degree, with his brothers and sisters — engram- 
complexes that will powerfully influence, for good or evil, 
his subsequent conduct and happiness. Thus, though it may 
be too absolute to say that Jack, when he goes a-marrying, 
will be unconsciously seeking his mother again, yet it is safe 
to predict that his behaviour in the new relation will be greatly 
affected, positively or negatively, by the character of the first 
intimate intercourse of his life. For, as Mr. Shand has pointed 
out, and as we have already suggested, every strong sentiment 
generates its own peculiar qualities which tend to reappear in 
analogous sentiments. Similarly, the qualities developed in 
Jack's sentiments towards the family cat and dog may be 
expected to colour his behaviour towards human beings over 
whom he has the same despotic power, or, if they do not appear 
in the same form, will probably be expressed symbolically 
or show other signs that they are working in the darkness of 
" the unconscious " (pp. 47-53). Similarly, again, Jack will 
discover in the development of his sentiments towards his 
school studies the ideal of patient and thorough work to which 
he will owe so much of his success as an electrical engineer. 

We may suppose Jack now to have reached the age of seven. 
He has already completed much of his education — perhaps the 
most important part, both quantitatively and qualitatively. 
For, on the one hand, he will certainly not learn as much during 
any subsequent septennium, and, on the other hand, he has 



THE GROWTH OF THE SELF 147 

acquired the absolute essentials for civilized living; he has 
even learnt, perhaps, to read and write. His visible progress 
has not been uniform ; for apparent mental growth, like physi- 
cal growth, advances not in a straight line but in waves. Until 
the age of three, Jack was climbing rapidly up the first wave, 
and is now in slack water. But this is true, we repeat, only 
of what is seen. During the last couple of years a great 
deal of consolidation has been going on beneath the surface, and 
that is of equal importance with visible advance. After a 
second period of rapid movement, a second slack time may 
be expected about the age of fourteen; while a third great 
wave will carry the youth on to the middle twenties. At that 
age, as James says, old fogeydom already lays his hand on 
most of us, little as we may expect it ; there are no more revolu- 
tions, but only consolidation and humdrum progress along 
lines already fixed. ^ 

Each of these new departures is preluded by the emergence 
of new types of instinctive impulse, or at least by changes in 
the range and relative importance of the existing types. 
During the first seven years, home has given Jack all he 
needed; he has been contented to go his own way, finding his 
own pleasures, and using his elders shamelessly as means to 

1 W. Stern, whose judicious summary ("Tatsachen und Ursaehen der 
seelische Entwicklung," Ztschft. f. ang. Psych., 1907) is very helpful here, 
does not fail to point out that the law of undular advance holds for particu- 
lar accomplishments as well as for general development. He records, for 
instance, that his child had, at fifteen months, fifteen words at her disposal. 
For some months she appeared to gain very few more, though her parents 
noted (at nineteen months) their imjDression that her "speech-reservoir" 
was silently filling up and must some day suddenly overflow. Their expecta- 
tion was fulfilled; for during her twenty-fifth month she made use of more 
than fifty words for the first time. 

Similar phenomena occur at all ages and in connection with all branches 
of learning, and are, as Stern rightly insists, of much importance from the 
standpoint of teaching-method; the most active mind needs its " incubation- 
periods" during which to consolidate past achievements and to prepare 
for a fresh advance. (Cf. Ballard's, experiment, p. 46.) 

We may add here that the waves of development in girls appear, as a 
rule, a year or so before they appeal' in their brothers, and spend their force 
earlier. There are, nevertheless, good reasons for giving girls an additional 
year of school before sending them to the University or into business. 



148 EDUCATION: DATA AND FIRST PRINCIPLES 

them. For the last year or two he has attended a " Montessori 
school " or a Kindergarten, and has enjoyed his life there im- 
mensely, finding the school a glorified annexe to home, where 
one has more interesting things to do with less interference 
from fussy grown-ups. But as eight approaches he begins 
to hear the call of larger interests, and to feel the need of 
other children to be no longer " supers " but fellow-actors in 
the drama of life. Home loses its all-importance, and shrinks 
to a base of operations where one reposes and refits between 
dazzling adventures with joyous comrades in the great 
world. Jack is enrolled in a pack of " Wolf cubs, " and joins 
the junior department of the neighbouring grammar school.^ 
Here, being a lad of good parts, he rapidly develops intellectual 
as well as practical interests, and, between his games, becomes 
a great reader. In this way, and by ruthless questioning of 
informative elders, he picks up a considerable amount of 
assorted learning, and by twelve has acquired an astounding 
knowledge about aeroplanes — a subject in which he has 
latterly been specializing with enormous energy. 

The broadest difference between the earlier phase of child- 
hood and the one Jack has now reached may be expressed in 
Freudian terms by saying that the former is ruled by the 
"pleasure-pain principle," the latter by the "reality 
principle." We have noted this difierence in play (pp. 83-4), 
seeing how the infant's activities first develop in a fantasy- 
world which answers instantly to his desires, and only later 
become disciplined to the conditions of reality. It would, 
however, be an error to regard the pleasure-pain principle 
and the reality principle as connoting radically different types 
of impulse. The transition from one to the other consists in 
the gradual permeation of relatively blind instinctive impulses 
by intellectual elements, in conformity with McDougall's 

^ We must pardon Jack's parents their middle-class snobbery, hoping 
that when he himself is a father (or at least a grandfather) the " public 
elementary schools" will have become truly "common schools." 



THE GROWTH OF THE SELF 149 

general law. At the same time, the conflict between the 
principles of which Freud speaks is a real and important 
thing. The boy of twelve is, in the main, a realist who has 
learnt to comport himself in his world (especially in his social 
world) as its nature requires ; but he is liable to lapses in which 
the complexes underlying his normal behaviour lose their 
coherence (p. 75), and his impulses seek, as in infancy, short 
cuts to satisfaction. Hence the sudden fits of "temper," 
of selfishness, and of other forms of naughtiness into which 
the best of boys or girls may fall.^ 

But this general difference is associated with one more 
specific — the definite emergence of the herd-instinct or 
" gregariousness " which is the main root of social conduct. 
Like all instincts, gregariousness develops from the level of 
simple, unorganized impulse to that of highly intellectualized 
behaviour. The boy of ten is a gregarious but hardly a 
socialized animal ; he still regards the world as his oyster, but 
demands the help and countenance of others in opening it. 
Thus he is essentially a member of a hunting pack in which 
he is either a leader or one of the led.^ He rarely attains to 

1 A writer iu the Educational Supplement of The Times (June 19tli, 
1919) points out that the " childishness" of adults is to be referred to the 
same cause, and contrasts this behaviour with the " childlikeness " or 
simplicity that often characterizes a thoroughly harmonized and stable 
nature. Upon the view of Dr. Rivers (p. 134, footnote) the forms of be- 
haviour dominated by the pleasure-pain principle and the reality principle 
would, presumably, be correlated, respectively, with the older protopathic 
and the newer epicritic nervous structures. The conflict of which Freud 
writes would be referred to the fact that the earlier structures may, at times, 
function in normal persons, as they do in some insane subjects, in quasi- 
independence of the more recent. 

2 It will be observed that Dr. McDougall's positive and negative self- 
instincts, when associated with the herd-instinct, take specific forms which 
Professor Graham Wallas has happily termed ' ' the instincts of Giving and 
Taking the Lead" [The Great Society, p. 142). 

In the view of some writers — e.g., Carveth Read (p. 39) — the herd-instinct 
arose historically when our prehuman ancestors, who were probably non- 
social, were compelled to turn from vegetarianism to flesh food, and were 
driven to hunting in packs like wolves. The reader will note the psycho- 
logical insight which led Sir R. S. Baden-Powell to institute the " Wolf 
Pack" for boys too young to sustain the dignity and fulfil the law of the 
Scout. 



150 EDUCATION: DA.TA AND FIRST PRINCIPLES 

the highei- levels of social conduct until he is swept up to them 
on the last great wave of his development — adolescence. 

The growth of the instinct illustrates very clearly Dr. 
McDougall's general theory. It is a mistake to think of it 
as an innate tendency towards social behaviour in the eulogistic 
sense of the word " social "; it consists, at first, in impulses, 
morally colourless, which simply urge a child to find his life 
in active relations with others. The course of those relations 
is settled rather by the subsequent history of the instinct than 
by its original character. Thus there are people, in whom 
the instinct is strong, who are miserable when they are alone 
because they have then no one to quarrel with ! But it is 
evident that if a child is to live in constant intercourse with 
others, he must make his ways square with theirs; he must 
make their mores his own. Hence the morality which the 
child first adds to the simple ethic of family life is the law of 
his pack: the club-law, which remains, with the majority, the 
most powerful influence on conduct throughout their days. 
With the advent of adolescence what was in the main an 
uncritical acceptance of the ways and standards of the herd 
may, however, deepen into an explicit " social consciousness " 
of a truly ethical or religious character. The adolescent often 
cherishes, with generous heat, ideals of social service and 
sacrifice for others; he may set himself deliberately to increase 
the happiness or to raise the ethical level of his society ; and 
may even be driven, if it proves to be hopelessly out of 
harmony with his new-found ideals, to repudiate its claims 
upon him, and to transfer his allegiance to some company of 
elect souls, the noble living or the noble dead. 

Social life, created and sustained by the gregarious instinct, 
is thus the primary school of morals in which all men are 
formed. Speaking generally, the principles of conduct learnt 
there are those that tend to subserve the stability and well- 
being of the common life; but, since societies have grown up 
under the most varied conditions and have widely different 



THE GROWTH OF THE SELF 151 

histories, there have been and still are great divergences 
between their actual moral codes .^ Even within the limits of 
a single social group there may be differences of life so marked 
and so constant as to generate widely diverse conceptions of 
virtue and vice. According to the American sociologist, 
Thorstein Veblen,^ the social structure of the modern Western 
nations still retains, in transmuted form, a moral bifurcation 
of this kind, established in the barbarian stage of their cultural 
development. Barbarian man reserved to himself all functions 
connected with government, warfare, hunting, religious 
observances and sports ; and he relegated all base, mechanical 
functions to his women. With the growth of slavery this 
division of functions ceased to have the simplicity of a sex- 
distinction, but it persists in modern societies as the difference 
between the leisured, non-productive classes and the " lower 
orders " who labour with their hands. 

Now the important point is that the primitive severance of 
functions produced two very different schemes of values; 
in short, two moral traditions, in part complementary but in 
part sharply opposed. The masculine tradition gives honour 
to the qualities that ensure success in aggressive and preda- 
tory activities, to the ostentatious accumulation of property 
beyond the needs of use, to " conspicuous leisure " in which 
the lord's women-folk and retinue must share for the increase 
of his glory, to social splendour, finally to learning and art — 
for these, too, offer opportunities of patronage and a field of 
useless occupation where the humbler or less robustious 
members of the honorific class may find scope for an " instinct 
of workmanship " that cannot be wholly suppressed. The 
feminine tradition exalts peacefulness, pity, loving-kindness, 
endurance of toil and hard living, and the other qualities that 
make for success in productive and industrial activities. 

^ TI18 facts collected in such works as Westermarck's " Origin and 
Development of Moral Ideas ' ' show impressively how great the divergences 
are. 

2 "The Theory of the Leisure Glass" (Macmillan, 1905). 



152 EDUCATION: DATA AND FIRST PRINCIPLES 

The social stir and confusion that mark the modern age is 
due mainly to the present tendency of the two traditions to 
overflow their ancient borders. On the one hand, the 
mechanical class threatens the preserves of the predatory 
aristocracy. The rich merchant hankers after a country 
estate; the smaller tradesman must have his suburban villa 
with well-trimmed lawn and " conspicuously useless " flower- 
beds ; the artisan demands leisure to pursue sport, learning 
or art; the lowliest peasants discard their convenient and 
graceful costumes to assume the garb of those who neither 
toil nor spin. On the other hand, the aristocracy are, with 
increasing frequency, engaging in industry and commerce. 
They go upon the Stock Exchange or into banking, they be- 
come company directors, they take ranches in the newer 
countries, they even engage in trade. And more significant 
still, there is in all classes, especially in the higher, the demand 
of women for "emancipation"; a demand, says Veblen, 
motived partly by a determination to escape from their 
barbarian status as foils to men, partly by a longing to satisfy 
the " instinct of workmanship " in which woman's nature is 
so rich. 

Other writers have emphasized another discrepancy in our 
moral traditions : namely, between the tradition of home life, 
where the rule is co-operation for the good of all, and the 
tradition of the economic world, where every man's hand is 
against his fellows. The practical conclusion they reach is, 
in principle, the same as that which follows from Veblen's 
study: if our civilization is to be healed of its present sickness, 
if social equilibrium is again to be reached, it can be only 
through a fusion of the two moral traditions which will give 
woman-morality its due place in every department of life.^ 

^ This is the burden of Alfred Corner's stirring little book, " The End 
of Male Ascendancy" (The Peto Publishing Company, 1917) and of some 
profound pages in B. Branford's "Janus and Vesta" (see p. 220). It is 
also the leading idea in Benjamin Kidd's "Science of Power" (Methuen, 
1918). 



THE GROWTH OF THE SELF 153 

Our concern with these views is not to assess them, but 
to use them to exemplify the principle that the moral code 
actually expressed in men's deeds, in distinction (often a 
painful distinction) from the code they ojBB.cially profess, is a 
function of the concrete social order wherein they live and act. 
That principle has most important educational corollaries. It 
not only explains the existence of that unsatisfactory thing 
called " schoolboy morality," but shows that no moral instruc- 
tion can change it unless the form of the school society is itself 
changed. It also shows, conversely, that moral instruction 
is useless unless it is based on the actual social experience 
of boys and girls, and helps them to solve the problems of 
conduct their experience presents. Thus, it reinforces the 
principle that the school should give its pupils scope to work 
out their own education freely under the guidance of sound 
traditions (p. 103). Lastly, it reminds the teacher that the 
moral tradition he himself follows and tends to propagate is 
almost certainly coloured by some specific type of social 
experience and history. It challenges him, therefore, to 
ascertain its sources, and so assure himself that it represents 
not the narrow outlook of a single class, or even of a single 
people, but something universally human. 

The social instinct, we have said, begins its finer work as 
adolescence approaches. Jack, we may suppose, has now 
reached that great climacteric, that new birth of body and mind . 
The premonitory symptoms have been evident for the last 
year or two : a sudden increase in height, a loss of the rounded 
features of childhood, a deterioration in the treble voice that 
did such good serviceinthe school choir. It has been remarked, 
too, that his zeal for study had diminished, that he had 
deserted his old hobbies, that he had become a little moody 
and intractable — in short, that he seemed to have lost his 
bearings. But though, at sixteen, he is no longer the same 
Jack, he is rapidly shaping into a new one. He displays a 



154 EDUCATION: DATA AND FIRST PRINCIPLES 

startling solicitude about his appearance, is exacting on the 
question of collars, resents imputations on his manners, and 
is conscious, evidently in a bewildering new way, of the exist- 
ence of the other sex. As regards work, he has pulled him- 
self together in time to pass his matriculation examination 
creditably, and is now entering upon an advanced course in 
science and mathematics with great vigour, and with a clear 
awareness that he is laying the foundations of his professional 
career. Indeed, if he were not at least equally zealous for 
the honour of his school in sports, and serious about his duties 
as a prefect, he might degenerate into that deplorable charac- 
ter, a " swot " ! His inner mind is not nearly so accessible 
as of old, but those who are privileged to glimpse into it find 
great changes there. Jack has stumbled into the discovery 
of two infinites — the infinite in nature and the infinite in his 
own soul. The childish fancy that once played capriciously 
with the outer world is replaced by the imagination that 
seeks its deeper meaning. He is just now reading Keats and 
Darwin wth hot enthusiasm and a vague feeling that they 
belong together. He will gladly talk about them with his 
intimates, but about his other discovery he is silent. It is 
known, however, that he slips off to church on unoflB.cial 
occasions, and it is suspected that he has a copy of Thomas 
a Kempis concealed in his bedroom. 

These things are clear evidence that new sentiments are 
springing up in Jack's nature, and that some of the earlier 
ones are changing their objects and becoming greatly widened 
and deepened. These will, no doubt, exhibit many qualities 
carried over from his childish sentiments ; but repressions and 
sublimination have been active during the period of change, 
and much of the older material has been worked up into forms 
novel enough to give a fresh turn to the lad's character. 

Among the expanded structures we must take special 
note of what McDougall calls the self-regarding sentiment. 
In early life our sentiments are almost as " objective " as the 



THE GROWTH OF THE SELF 155 

animals'. A greedy little boy aims at the largest share of the 
chocolates as simply as a greedy dog aims at getting the 
largest share of the bones ; a little girl in a pretty new frock 
indulges her positive self-feeling almost as naively as a pea- 
cock exhibiting his tail. Even in adult life such objectivity 
remains possible; a man may often be so much absorbed in 
the immediate object of his activity as to forget everything 
else. But in quite early days man, as distinguished from other 
animals, begins first to recognize, then to appreciate himself 
as an actor in his life's drama. *' Self-consciousness " probably 
arises from the infant's discovery of the distinction between 
his body and all other things, a distinction made possible by 
the pleasures and pains that are found to be connected with 
the body. In time it spreads from this centre to his clothes 
and his toys, to his family and friends; in later years to the 
house he owns, to his prize dogs, to the business he has built 
up, and so on indefinitely. For his dealings with these things 
give rise not only to sentiments directed immediately towards 
them, but also to a secondary ** self -regarding " sentiment 
directed towards them as inseparably connected with his 
feeling and acting self. In short these things become, so to 
speak, the capital with which he consciously faces the world ; 
and that capital, as it prospers or dwindles, is the object of 
joy or sorrow, hope or fear, and of the other systematized 
feelings that may enter into a sentiment. Meanwhile he 
learns, through relations with others, to focus his attention 
upon himself as an agent and upon the character of his acts. 
Through the praise and blame, the rewards and punishments 
of parents and teachers, through the frank verdicts and 
merciless practical criticism of his school-fellows, through the 
more restrained but yet more terrible force of " club opinion " 
in adult life, he comes to entertain towards himself as an 
agent emotions and desires that enter into and become the 
strongest part of the self -regarding sentiment. 

A healthy adolescent has usually reached in this way a 



156 EDUCATION: DATA AND FIRST PRINCIPLES 

fairly coherent conception of his self as an " id-sal object," 
including some virion of what he actually is and some prevision 
of what he may and should become. It may be merely the 
idea of a self that keeps strictly within the limits of " good 
form," or of one inspired by teaching, observation and read- 
ing to stretch out towards original lines of achievement and 
lofty ends. And when it is formed, the self-regarding senti- 
ment, whose object it is, plays in all the affairs of his life, 
especially in its crises, the dominant and most widely con- 
trolling part. 

It will be seen that the function of the self-regarding 
sentiment is to exercise control over the " objective " senti- 
ments that form the ground-basis of the self. Suppose a 
money-loving man to have the opportunity of making great 
gain by safe but questionable means. A habit of honesty, 
acquired like a dog's, may keep him straight, but if this is 
not strong enough, there may still be, in the self-regarding 
sentiment, a reserve force sufficient to restrain the impulses 
that belong to the sentiment for gain. The man turns his 
mental gaze back from the immediate object of the sentiment 
and views himself as the agent in this dirty business. His 
self-contemplation is coloured by the shame and remorse 
he had suffered through backsliding in the past, and by antici- 
pation of possible shame and remorse to come ; and the thought 
of himself as the doer of this act is, we may suppose, rejected 
in a moment of aversion that wells up out of the self-regarding 
sentiment. 

This trite example may suffice to show how the self- 
regarding sentiment becomes the vehicle of " conscience " 
and of the moral will that waits on it, and also to indicate the 
essential part played by the social instinct in the generation 
of conscience. But the sentiment serves another controlling 
function of high importance. If, like Professor James, " I, 
who for the time have staked my all on being a psychologist, 
am mortified if others know much more psychology than I; 



THE GROWTH OF THE SELF 157 

but I am contented to wallow in the grossest ignorance of 
Greek," it is because my self -regarding sentiment has firmly 
attached itself to myself-as-a-psychologist as its " ideal 
object." In brief, the sentiment acts like a gyroscopic wheel, 
keeping my self-assertion true to its main direction of expres- 
sion (see p. 142). 

We must, however, be careful not to take too simple a 
view of this function. The ground-basis of the self is, as we 
have seen, a very complicated thing, prompting to develop- 
ments in many directions, some of which would prove, in the 
end, quite incompatible. A man, gifted by nature and smiled 
on by fortune, may approximate to the Greek ideal, and 
build up a self into which the love of the body, of family and 
friends, of riches, of intellectual and spiritual things makes 
a unified and nicely balanced whole; but even a man of 
"strong character " generally has to make drastic sacrifices 
among his possibilities, while a man of weak character wobbles 
and drifts and reaches no stable self at all.i The average 
man compromises; he tries to run several more or less distinct 
selves, among which there must generally be, in James's phrase, 
a certain conflict and rivalry. Thus Jack at the age of forty 
will not be merely an electrical engineer. He will be also, 
we may imagine, a devoted family man, keen upon backing 
his wife's social pretensions, and on securing his children's 
future ; an esteemed churchwarden, who stands well with the 
vicar and is not indifierent to his reputation for serious views 
and good works; and, perhaps, a golfer sternly bent on re- 

1 A quotation from James' s famous chapter ( ' ' Principles of Psychology, ' ' 
ch. X.) is inevitable here: " Not that I would not, if I could, be both hand- 
some and fat and well dressed, and a great athlete, and make a million a 
year; be a wit, a hon vivant, and a lady-killer, as well as a philosopher; 
a philanthropist, statesman, warrior, and African explorer, as well as a 
" tone-poet " and saint. But the thing is simply impossible. The million- 
aire's work would run counter to the saint's; the bon vivant and the philan- 
thropist would trip each other up; the philosopher and the lady-killer could 
not well keep house in the same tenement of clay. Such different char- 
acters may conceivably at the outset of life be alike 'possible to a man. But 
to make any one of them actual, the rest must more or less be suppressed.' ' 



158 EDUCATION: DATA AND FIRST PRINCIPLES 

ducing his handicap. And he will be singularly fortunate 
if his organism can carry these diverse selves without occasional 
distraction and conflict. 

Even in normal cases, then, the self-regarding sentiment 
does not exercise perfectly its function of control over the 
development and organization of the primary sentiments ; to a 
certain extent it is liable, so to speak, to be divided against 
itself. In pathological cases a group of sentiments may get 
so entirely out of hand that the division in the self-regarding 
sentiment becomes complete, and to say that the organism 
harbours more than one self is then a statement of plain fact. 
These are the cases of " multiple personality," of which one 
of the best studied^ is the celebrated case of " Miss Beau- 
champ." the University student whose organism, as the result 
of some moral shock, produced a vigorous secondary person- 
ality calling herself " Sally " — a personality with all the live- 
liness and caprice of a naughty child, who from time to 
time displaced the prim Miss Beauchamp from command 
of her sense-organs and powers of movement, and horri- 
fied that innocent young woman by the scandalous levity 
of the conduct for which she was made to appear respon- 
sible. 

We need expect no such catastrophes in the life of Jack, 
whose supposititious career has been used as the occasion for 
our psychological comments; but their existence and nature 
strongly confirm the view of the self, as a gradually 
developed organization, which we have attempted to 
make clear. 

1 By Dr. Morton Prince ("The Dissociation of a Personality," Long- 
mans, 1906). Other famous cases are described in James's "Principles." 
B. Hart, "The Psychology of Insanity," ch. iv. (see above, p. 57), gives a 
very clear analysis of the phenomena of dissociation — which are, as the reader 
will see, closely connected with the facts of relaxation described on pp. 74-5. 



THE GROWTH OF THE SELF ^ 159 



NOTES ON BOOKS, ETC, 

Mr. A. F. Shand's theory of sentiments is expounded and used in 
McDougall's "Social Psychology" and developed at length in his own 
book, "The Foundations of Character" (Macmillan, 1914). J. M. Baldwin, 
" Social and Ethical Interpretations " (Macmillan, 1899), illustrptcs fully the 
inter-play of positive and negative moments described on p. 140. J. W. 
Slatt(J1iter, "The Adolescent" (George Allen, 1912), is an excellent little 
book for those who cannot face Stanley Hall's monumental "Adolescence " 
(Appleton, 2 vols. ^ 1904). The first chapter of L. T. Hobhottse, "Morals 
in Evolution" (Chapman and Hall, 2nd ed., 1908), gives a masterly analysis 
of the role of the social instinct in moral growth. 



CHAPTEK XIII 

THE MECHANISM OF KNOWLEDGE AND ACTION 

In the preceding chapter we traced the growth of the self 
mainly in terms of feeling, for the reason that our appetites 
and emotions are in a special sense the " foundations of 
character." But, with the discussion of Chap. XI. in mind, 
the reader will readily see that there can be no organization 
of feelings into sentiments, of sentiments into a self, apart 
from a parallel development in the objects to which feeling 
responds and in the actions that issue from it. Thus the 
simple emotion of fear may be awakened, say, by the explosion 
of a bomb, but the sentiment of hatred that grows out of it 
has a much more remote and complex object, such as war, 
while the self as a whole responds to still more abstract objects, 
such as duty; and the actions that flow from the emotion, 
from the sentiment, from the self, show a corresponding 
increase in complexity. 

The task now before us is to study in more detail the growth 
of cognition (or knowledge) and of action. For education, 
it is of the highest importance to realize that cognition and 
action always occur in an organic unity from which neither 
can be separated without destruction of the other. In the 
simpler activities the connection between them is easily 
brought out, even when it is not immediately obvious. It is 
clear, for instance, that one cannot "take in " the form of 
an object or the contents of a picture without constant 
adjustments of head and eyes, including delicate movements 
of the focusing muscles. Again, if the reader will open his 

160 



MECHANISM OF KNOWLEDGE AND ACTION 161 

mouth, hold his lips widely apart, and think how such words 
as "prism," "parallelogram" sound, he will probably be 
aware of an almost irresistible tendency to move lips and 
tongue, and find that he cannot pronounce the words " men- 
tally " unless at least he deliberately recalls how the move- 
ments of those organs would " feel." Conversely, if he will 
scribble a few sentences, attending meanwhile to what goes 
on in his mind, he will probably notice that the act of writing 
is accompanied by " inner speech " — that is, by the silent 
repetition of the words in his own voice or another's ; and he 
may, especially where he is uncertain of the spelling, have 
before his " mental eye " a fleeting vision of how the words 
look in print or script .^ 

In the higher types of intellectual activity the connection 
between cognition and action becomes so subtle that it needs 
careful analysis to bring it to light; but it can always be 
detected if the inquiry is pushed deep enough. For example, 
the mastery of a geometrical theorem would seem a purely 
intellectual performance; yet when the learner is bidden to 
"suppose the triangle ABC to be superimposed upon the 
triangle DEF," it becomes clear that action, after all, is not 
really excluded. Facts of this kind justify Mr. Bradley in 
saying that to reason is to " perform an ideal experiment "; 
we do so-and-so in imagination and note what consequences 
would follow. Nor is thought free from the trammels of 
action even when it soars into the heights of metaphysics — 

Where never creeps a cloud, or moves a wind, . . . 
Nor sound of human sorrow mounts to mar 
Their sacred everlasting calm. 

The silent repetition of the sound of speech or (e.g.) of a melody is 
called an auditory image, the " mental picture" of an absent object a visual 
image. People differ widely in regard to their power of calling up images 
and the use they make of them. Some, especially scientific men, who get 
into the habit of thinking solely in terms of words and mathematical sym- 
bols, appear to have no visual imagery. It is, however, probable that all 
normal children have both visual and auditory images, and that the differ- 
ences that are found in older persons are due to habit and practice. The 

U 



162 EDUCATION: DATA AND FIRST PRINCIPLES 

For thought can rise only on the wings of words, and, as we 
shall see, the meaning of the most abstract words is, at bottom, 
only action, cunningly disguised. 

We have here the basis of the well-worn maxim, Learn 
by Doing; which means that understanding and action are 
so intimately related by nature that they cannot be sundered 
without loss — loss that does not fall least heavily on the side 
of understanding. This, for example, is what Sir J. J. 
Thomson meant when he observed that Senior Wranglers, 
on taking a course of practical work in his laboratory, were 
astonished to find that their formulae were true ! A mathe- 
matical truth may be but a tenuous thing, even for a Senior 
Wrangler, until it gains life and body by incorporation in 
action. That is why it is hardly possible to overestimate 
the value of practical work in teaching such subjects as 
mathematics, geography and science, especially in the 
earlier stages. Even where practical work is not feasible, a 
theoretical argument should generally be presented in a 
setting of imagined experience, rather than in a purely logical 
exposition. 1 The judicious use of the dramatic method in 
teaching history is parallel with the direct form of practical 
work; while to discuss the application of historical and 
political principles to present-day problems is to follow the 
indirect practical method which is generally more appropriate 
in teaching older pupils. ^ And we have recently insisted on 

imagination of "how it feels" to make a movement — e.g., to lift the arm 
while it remains at one's side, or to stand up while one remains sitting — 
is called a kincssthetic image. This type of image is referred to in the pre- 
ceding sentence of the text. 

^ The reader will find in Professor John Perry's writings, in Mr. J. 
Strachan's article in "The New Teaching," or in the present author's 
"Teaching of Algebra" numerous applications of this principle in mathe- 
matics. 

2 In one well-lmown public school the history master used to take his 
senior boys to some characteristic industrial district to study political 
and industrial problems m sihi. ; in another, local trade union leaders, etc., 
are invited to visit the school debating society from time to time. There is 
a daTiger that such methods may be turned to propagandist purposes that 
have no proper place in a school, but, if judiciously used, they succeed, as 
nothing else can, in giving a solid basis to historico-political studies. 



MECHANISM OF KNOWLEDGE AND ACTION 163 

the importance of basing moral training on vivid and natural 
social experience (p. 153). All this fits in, as it ought to do, 
with what we have learnt about the didactic value of the 
play-motive. 

The old psychology taught that all higher knowledge 
grows out of the immediate cognitive contact^ with the outer 
world which we gain through the senses. Modern psychology 
insists that the basis is really wider than this ; that it includes 
not only sensation, but also the muscular movements which 
sensations provoke through feeling. The famous statue 
which Condillac imagined to become endowed with the human 
senses, one after the other, would never have gained human 
intelligence as long as it remained a statue, and so unable to 
reply by movement to the challenges of the outer world. The 
physician-teacher Seguin was the first to grasp clearly the 
pedagogical significance of this truth. He noticed that weak- 
minded children are often incapable of the simplest organized 
movements; they cannot grasp and roll a ball like normal 
children, or follow its path easily by co-ordinated movements 
of head and eye. With penetrating insight he connected 
their feebleness of intellect with this deficiency, and sought 
to ameliorate the former by curing the latter. His method, 
as is well known, was adapted by Dr. Montessori to be a car- 
dinal feature of the training she prescribes for normal 
children. In a Montessori school the little people of 
three and four spend much time in inserting buttons 
into button-holes, in threading and tying laces, in fitting 
cylinders and geometrical insets into the holes that 
match them; and it is claimed that in this way they 

^ We must distinguish between the immediate cognitive contact we 
have with a thing when we see, hear, touch, smell or taste it, and the in- 
direct cognitive contact we have when we remember or think of it in its 
absence, using images or words, or when we learn about it through the 
spoken or written speech of another. There is a parallel distinction between 
direct and indirect action — for instance, I may go and fetch a thing myself, 
or move another's muscles to do so by speech or writing. 



164 EDUCATION: DATA AND FIRST PRINCIPLES 

lay the best possible foundation for higher intellectual 
achievements. 1 

The " sensori-motor reactions " which contain, according 
to this doctrine, the promise and potency of all human 
achievement, call for closer examination. Let us consider 
a typical case. I approach a puppy, lying passively on his 
side, and stimulate his skin by patting him lightly behind 
the shoulder. After two or three taps, his hind leg begins 
to show a rhythmic vibration which soon grows into a vigorous 
scratching movement. When I cease patting, this movement 
continues for a moment and then dies away. To understand 
what has happened here we must look with the eyes of the 
anatomist and the physiologist below the dog's skin. Beneath 
numerous spots (" pressure spots ") in the area patted, fine 
white threads arise which can be traced back to the spinal cord 
that lies within the backbone. On the way thither, they come 
together to form bundles (the " nerves "), in which they lie 
side by side, insulated from one another like the wires in an 
electric cable. Just before a bundle runs into the cord 
through a " posterior root," making its way between two 
" vertebra? " of the spine, each thread connects sideways with 
a minute bulb of nervous matter forming part of a swelling 
or " ganglion " of the posterior root. Beyond these bulbous 
masses the threads enter into the cord, and break up into 
fine branches that are distributed largely round the similar 
bulbs that teem there. 

1 Mis8 Margaret McMillan, in her touching little book, "The Camp 
School" (Allen and Unwin, 1017), maintains that much of the dulncss and 
backwardjiess of children in a slum district, such as Deptford, is due to lack 
of training of the basal senses— that is, not only of the eye and ear, but of 
smell, the temiierature sense and the " mother sense" of touch. Only one 
in twelve of her children could, when blindfolded, tell one strong-scented 
flower from another. Some would be content to live in a bath of perspira- 
tion, always over-clothed; some to remain in the open with blue lips and 
chattering teeth. " The patience of the poor [she says] is not all patience. 
It is largely insensibility." To such children a shower-bath, with its power- 
ful appeal to dull senses and flaccid muscles, may mean a veritable begin- 
ning of intellectual and moral enlightenment. 



II 



MECHANISM OF KNOWLEDGE AND ACTION 165 

Each thread with its bulb constitutes a " neurone " or 
anatomical unit of the nervous system. The bulb is the 
" nerve-cell " or " cell-body," the centre of the neurone's 
life and activity.^ The thread, from the pressure-spot to 
the cell-body, is the " axon " or nerve- fibre of the neurone; 
beyond that point it is the " dendron," breaking up into fine 
" dendrites." Since the function of the neurones we have 
just now in view is to carry the nervous stimulation from the 
skin to the spinal-cord, they are called " sensory," " afferent," 
Of " receptor " neurones, and the ends of the axons, where 
the " nervous current " was set up by the tapping, are called 
" receptor organs," or simply " receptors." 

The nervous current conveyed through a receptor neurone 
passes, by way of its dendron and dendrites, into one or more 
" connector neurones " that lie entirely within the spinal 
cord. To reach them it must cross the separating surfaces 
or " synapses " that break the anatomical continuity of the 
nervous path. The synapses are the seat of a varying resist- 
ance, at present little understood though of supreme impor- 
tance, and serve as valves which permit the current to flow 
from neurone to neurone only in the " forward " direction. 
Within the cord it may pass from one connector neurone to 
another, across the synapses, along a vast variety of paths. 
To awaken consciousness, it must make its way upward to 
that expansion of the cord which we call the brain ; to produce 
movement, it must issue from the cord along neurones of a 
third type, called "efferent," "motor," or "effector," The 
cell-bodies of these neurones lie within the cord, and their 
axons, leaving the cord by its " anterior roots," take their 
way towards the periphery in the same nerve-bundles as 
convey the afferent neurones towards the cord. Along them 
the nervous current is distributed to the muscles, and there 
sets up the contractions that cause the movement. 

1 A nervous thread or axon dies if cut off from the cell-body. This 
fact is largely utilized in tracing the course of a neurone. 



166 EDUCATION: DATA AND FIRST PRINCIPLES 

It will be seen that every motor neurone may be a " final 
common path " for currents that reach it by endless difierent 
tracks along the connector-neurones of the brain and cord; 
hence the possibility of the infinite variety of ** voluntary " 
movements that may occur under the control of the brain. 
But to complete our picture we must note that most anterior 
roots of the cord also contain connector-axons which make 
their way to effector-neurones entirely outside the cord. Since 
these neurones are reached each by a current that arrives, 
ultimately, along a single line, the effects they excite are not 
subject to modification by the will. They constitute, therefore, 
an " involuntary " or " autonomic " system. Organized into 
three main groups (separated by the nerve-trunks from arms 
and legs), together with a smaller group in the head, their 
function is to control the flow of the blood, the digestive move- 
ments of the intestines, and the excretory organs, and to bring 
about the automatic adjustments of the eyes. In addition, 
there seem to be effector-neurones, associated with each main 
group of the autonomic system, which control the secretion 
of the sweat-glands in the skin, the digestive glands, etc. 

To return to the scratching puppy. When the nervous 
currents set up by the patting reach the cord, they must 
find tracks of low resistance already prepared, along which 
to flow through the connector-neurones to the effector- 
neurones of the leg ; for it is otherwise impossible to see why 
the stimulation is followed by scratching rather than by any 
other movement of body or limbs. Physiologists use the 
term " reflex system " to describe this innate connection 
between a group of receptor and a group of effector neurones. 
In some reflexes — for example, the " knee-jerk," or the blink- 
ing reflex that is released when an object suddenly approaches 
the eye — the mechanism is relatively simple; in others it is 
exceedingly complicated. For instance, the puppy's scratch- 
reflex must contain arrangements to secure not merely simple 
movements, but rhythmic contractions of the ** antagonistic " 



MECHANISM OF KNOWLEDGE AND ACTION 167 

muscles that cause backward and forward movements of 
the leg. 

But though a current takes more readily paths innately- 
prepared, it is by no means confined to them. Let the reader 
lay his arm, with palm upwards, on a table, and proceed to 
lift, at intervals of a second or less, a weight suspended from 
a finger by a string. He will find that the movement, at 
first confined to the relevant finger, will spread to the other 
fingers, then to the muscles of the lower arm and finally to the 
whole arm and shoulder. In this experiment, due to Dr. 
McDougall, we must suppose that fatigue gradually raised 
the resistance of the synapses along the original reflex path, 
and that the current then began to overflow into neighbouring 
paths, spreading ever wider as the resistance of these paths also 
rose.i The gradual consolidation of a movement learnt by 
trial and error (p. 45) shows the opposite process; the resist- 
ances along the relevant paths become so much reduced, by 
successful practice, that we have finally what psychologists 
aptly term a " secondary reflex." 

The first movements of all animals with a nervous system 
are reflexes, and reflexes form the basis of all the skilled 
movements they can acquire. Strictly speaking, for instance, 
a bird does not learn to peck, and can fly, without previous 
training, as soon as its wings and the correlated nervous 
mechanism have developed to the proper point. Similarly, 
an infant is born in vigorous possession of the sucking reflex, 
and discloses others as his nervous system ripens. At first he 
is contented to lie supine, but a moment comes when nothing 
can prevent him from sitting up. Later, he will propel 
himself rapidly across a floor by means of his arms, though 
he has never seen his parents use that undignified mode of 
progression. Later still, he stands erect and walks — generally, 

1 McDougall, "Fatigue" (Report of British Association, 1908). Dr. 
McDougall explains in the same way the progress of intoxication from the 
liveliness produced by the first glass to the toper's final collapse beneath the 
table. {Gf. p. 75.) 



168 EDUCATION: DATA AND FIRST PRINCIPLES 

it is true, with the ojB&cious assistance of admiring elders, 
but really in virtue of his walking-reflex. Subsequent 
achievements are made possible by the synthesis of the 
primary reflexes into larger systems. 

The way in which this synthesis is brought about has been 
described earlier (p. 120), and has, as regards certain forms of 
skilled performance, been made the subject of careful experi- 
ments. Of these the experiments of Professor W. F. Book 
on typewriting are particularly instructive.^ Book recorded 
graphically the rate of work of each learner, and found that 
the curves showed typical waves (c/. p. 147), corresponding 
to definite stages in the synthesis of the reflexes. The first 
stage is the learning of correct letter-habits — that is, of secon- 
dary reflexes which, at the moment the typing of a letter is 
willed, carry the right finger automatically to the right key. 
As these habits are acquired, the rate quickens, and the 
graphic record climbs upward. Soon, however, there comes 
a " plateau " showing a temporary arrest in the increase of 
speed, followed shortly by another rise. The interpretation 
is that the original letter-habits are being gathered up into 
syllable and word habits, in which the series of movements 
needed to type a syllable or a word are released by a single 
impulse. While these wider reflex-systems are forming, 
the partial withdrawal of attention from the individual letters 
causes errors and delay. It is, however, noteworthy that 
the letter-habits themselves become perfected only through 
the formation of the higher habits. Later, there may be a 
plateau corresponding to the emergence of phrase-habits; 
but it is naturally less definite and may be absent. During 
the whole process, imagery of several kinds plays an impor- 
tant part; though, as skill increases, it tends to drop out and 
to leave the impulse to write a word or phrase to be followed 
directly by the required movements. It is probably for that 

^ "The Paychologj' of Skill" (University of Montana Publications in 
Psychology, 1908). 



MECHANISM OF KNOWLEDGE AND ACTION 169 

reason that the best results are obtained by learners who adopt 
the ** touch method " from the beginning, instead of the 
" sight method " in which the fingers are guided to the keys 
by the eye. It is possible, further, that we have here a justi- 
fication of Dr. Montessori's practice of teaching children the 
forms of letters kinsesthetically instead of visually, by making 
them run their fingers round sand-papered letters and draw 
the shapes blindfolded. 

The general bearing of these results on teaching hand- 
writing has been questioned but seems clear. Some teachers 
would begin with the word as the smallest unit that has 
meaning ; but we see that if legible and beautiful wiiting^ is 
to be learnt, the child should first establish the habits of lowest 
order. There is no reason why a " play- way," such as Dr. 
Montessori's, or more ancient nursery ways, should not be 
used to give isolated letters sufl&cient meaning. Book's 
results warn us, however, (i.) that the child should be allowed 
to advance spontaneously from single letters to words, and 
(ii.) that these should be words that he can already read with 
ease. On the whole, a " phonic " method, in which the child 
learns to construct words to match their sounds, by putting 
movable letters together, and afterwards writes them, seems 
to be indicated. 

Such a method implies teaching reading and writing in 
close association and with letters of the same form. Learning 
to read involves, in fact, building up recognition-habits of 
increasing complexity corresponding to the increasingly 
complex movement-habits of writing; so that a child's 
progress in the sister-arts should illustrate the principles laid 
down in the first two paragraphs of this chapter. If one 
stands behind an expert reader, holding a small mirror near 
his eye, it is easy to observe that the eye does not move contin- 
uously along the line, but covers the space in from three to 

^ E.g., the modified mediseval script which now threatens to displace 
the ugly and featureless modem forms. 



y 



y 170 EDUCATION: DATA AND FIRST PRINCIPLES 

five jerks separated by momentary rests. It is during the 
rests that the recognition takes place, a logically connected 
word-group being " taken in " at each momentary glance.^ 
Thus the normal object of an expert's recognition-habit is a 
phrase. To this position children must be led through lower 
recognition-habits, due place being given to the law that a 
lower habit is perfected only as one passes on to the next 
higher, 2 

Cognition, as we have said, begins in the senses. In 
addition to the anciently recognized " five gateways of know- 
ledge," we must take account (i.) of the temperature and pain- 
senses whose receptors are in the skin ; (ii.) of the senses whose 
receptors are in the digestive and other inner organs, where 
their stimulation causes hunger and thirst, the well-being 
of health and the distress of illness, together with other 
vague sensations that are closely connected with our sense of 
personal identity ; (iii.) of the kinsesthetic sense, by which we 
are kept aware of the position and movements of the head, 
trunk and limbs. The kinsesthetic sense has, in addition to 
receptors in the joints, tendons and muscles, a highly impor- 
tant group in the labyrinth — a curious organ, deeply concealed 
within the ear. These are concerned not only in movements 
of head and eyes, but also in the initiation of a continuous 
series of reflexes which keep the body normally in a vertical 
position, and maintain the "tone" of the leg and trunk 
muscles by whose constant activity is made possible the 

^ See Huey, " The Psychology and Pedagogy of Reading," for accounts of 
more precise experiments. 

2 It should be unnecessary to point out that reading should at all stages 
be yneaningfid, but this elementary principle is often neglected where chil- 
dren are taught in large classes. One comes across children who can " read 
almost anything," but are yet quite unaware that the printed words convey 
meaning. The remedy is, once more, the " play -way." The child should be 
given "secret" instructions in writing which he is to read and carry out, 
etc. Even older pupils, who receive little but oral teaching, often have 
surprising difficulty in gaining information from books. The habit, which 
is, of course, the essential thing in reading, should be deliberately trained 
from the beginning. It is carefally to be distinguished from reading aloud, 
which should be treated as an iesthetic art akin to music and drama. 



MECHANISM OF KNOWLEDGE AND ACTION 171 

wonderful but little regarded feat of keeping upright. Thus 
the giddiness of a waltzer is due to unusual stimulation of 
the labyrinthine receptors,^ while the muscular collapse of a 
boxer ** knocked out " by a blow on the point of the jaw is 
explained by the shock to the labyrinth which puts the 
attitude-reflexes out of action. 

The sensations that arise from stimulation of the receptors 
in the inner organs are characteristically vague and diffuse, 
and tell us nothing about the objects that cause them. This 
fact is painfully well known to any sufferer from renal colic 
or appendicitis or even the " stomach-ache " of childhood. 
The special mark of the outwardly directed receptor-neurones 
seems to be, on the contrary, that they do yield us information 
about the bodies that awaken their activity. It is, however, 
now known that there are in the skin two sets of receptors — 
the protopathic and the epicritic — of which the former are 
closely akin to the receptors in the inner organs. This fact 
was brought clearly to light by Dr. Henry Head, who in a 
famous but unpleasant experiment permitted a collaborator 
to sever a nerve trunk supplying a large area of his arm and 
hand, and recorded what happened as sensibility slowly re- 
turned. The protopathic neurones — ^no doubt the more 
primitive in origin as they are in function — were the first to be 
regenerated. While they alone were active, the subject had 
no power to recognize the size, shape, weight, texture or 
spatial position of the bodies he touched. A pin-prick caused 
diffused pain, but no awareness that it was due to an 
external object, while rhythmic stimuli of any kind were felt 
as continuous. In a word, all that constitutes the objectivity, 
the spatial and temporal order, the quantitative as dis- 
tinguished from the qualitative aspects of sense-experience, 
returned only with the regeneration of the epicritic neurones. 

As the reader may surmise, the two sets of sensory neurones 

1 The odd behaviour of the "waltzing rat" appears to be due to an 
hereditary peculiarity iu the labyriathiae structure. 



\ 

172 EDUCATION: DATA AND FIRST PRINCIPLES 

have different destinations in the brain. The protopathic 
neurones deliver their nervous currents in the optic thalamus 
— a nervous mass in the floor of the brain — while the epicritic 
neurones carry theirs upwards to the cerebral cortex, whose 
enormous development in man distinguishes him, anatomi- 
cally, more than anything else, from the lower animals. The 
difEerence in the sensations mediated by these " two great 
receptive centres " is reflected in the character of the reflex 
movements they control. The reflexes of the protopathic 
system have the same diffuse, " all or none " character as its 
sensibility; for instance, the merely protopathic arm must 
withdraw when strongly stimulated by heat or pain;'^ but 
reflexes involving the epicritic mechanism are subject to the 
most delicate gradation and the widest variation. Thus we 
reach the idea of the cortex as the grand instrument of organ- 
ization and control; the means by which we win, on the sen- 
sory side, our vision and understanding of an orderly objective 
world spread out in space and time, and, on the motor side, 
the power of endlessly adjustable behaviour and creative skill. 
Much of what we have now discovered may be summed 
up in Professor C. S. Sherrington's dictum that the nervous 
system is an integrating mechanism, and the cerebral 
cortex the supreme integrating organ. But this statement 
must be supplemented by the equally important remark that 
the nervous system is also an analyzing mechanism, and that 
its highest analytic functions are performed by means of 
the cortex. An animal with no nervous system or with only 
a simple one can have at best but a rudimentary awareness 
of the world and of itself. To gain more it must be able to 
pick out and distinguish the different elements and qualities 
of which the world is composed. That feat is made possible 
for higher animals by the enormous development of the 
receptor-system, with its organs differentiated to deal, some 

^ Or the subject must react in some other violent way, as by kicking or 
screaming. 



MECHANISM OF KNOWLEDGE AND ACTION 173 

with light, some with sound, and so on. Similarly, a high 
development of action is possible only where there is a motor 
system which enables an animal to achieve a great variety 
of distinct movements. Thus the function of the nervous 
system is never purely integrative nor purely analytic, but 
always analytico- synthetic. And this two-fold nature of its 
activity appears equally in cognition and in action. 

We must presently study it in cognition in some detail; 
but before we do so it will be convenient to offer some remarks 
on a specially important type of behaviour in which the 
integrative function appears at its highest. We speak of will. 
In the popular view, will is a distinct power, possessed by 
different people in different degrees, which is brought on the 
scene to carry out one's actions or to break down resistance 
to them.^ The mistake here is in thinking that will is a 
S'pecial power separate from the energy expressed in one's 
other activities. The power by which I make and ensue 
a momentous decision is the same as the power by which I 
pick up a pin or tie my shoe-lace while conversing; what is 
different is the organization that lies behind the acts. Accord- 
ing to Dr. McDougall, will always involves the activity of the 
self-regarding sentiment (p. 156), in which case we must, 
apparently, deny it to all animals but man; but whether we 
do or do not accept such a limitation, we must agree that an 
act, to be properly called an act of will, must draw its energy 
not from a small part of our nature, but from some massive, 
deep-rooted, widely inclusive engram-complex. Thus if pick- 
ing up a pin expresses merely a habit of tidiness, it is not 
an act of will ; but if my right to pick it up is challenged, or 
if the pin is in a dangerous or inaccessible position, my self- 
regarding sentiment may be brought into play, and the act 
will then be unquestionably an act of will. 

^ It is just to say that something like this view appears to be advocated 
by Dr. N. Acli, who hns f-tiuliod will oxporimentally with great care, (f^ce 
p. 176.) 



174 EDUCATION: DATA AKD FIRST PRINCIPLES 

From this account it should be clear that there can be no 
** training of the will" apart from the general process by which 
the sentiments are built up. Hence Dr. Montessori is right 
in maintaining that to train a child's will we must begin 
by leaving him free to work out his own impulses. For if he 
is constantly checked or constantly acts only on the directions 
of another, there can be no building up of strong sentiments 
to be the basis of effective and well-regulated conduct. His 
earlier sentiments will be choked with inhibitions preventing 
natural action, and, in conformity with Shand's law (p. 116), 
will tend to pass their unsatisfactory quality on to all later 
sentiments. Thus we shall produce in the end a man who 
has never learnt to act from a wide and firmly organized 
inner basis ; a man who will at one time face a critical situation 
in hopeless indecision, at another will break out in childish 
and inconsequent action. 

The popular view has, nevertheless, a certain basis in fact. 
People differ immensely in native energy, and this difference 
comes out most markedly in the highly organized behaviour 
of will. Moreover, there are important differences in the 
way in which, in different persons, feeling is awakened by 
cognition and passes into action. From this point of view 
James distinguished between the " explosive " type of will 
in which an idea captures feeling and instantly issues into 
action, and the " obstructed " type, in which action is delayed 
by inhibitions. Dr. N. Ach has carried the analysis a good 
deal farther, bringing it into relation with the doctrine of 
" temperaments." To the four temperaments or " humours " 
anciently distinguished as the sanguine, the choleric, the 
phlegmatic and the melancholic, he adds a fifth, the "cautious " 
{besonnen). The cautious, sanguine and choleric tempera- 
ments have in common a high sensitiveness to outward events 
and influences, together with a strong motor tendency; while 
the phlegmatic and melancholic temperaments are alike in 
lacking these qualities. Comparing them from the standpoint 



MECHANISM OF KNOWLEDGE AND ACTION 175 

of will, we find that in both the cautious and the phlegmatic 
temperaments the determining tendencies that set and main- 
tain the direction taken by the action are not only very strong 
at the outset but also preserve their force with little diminution 
throughout its course. The sensitiveness and alertness of 
the cautious person make him welcome action, and give him 
a certain mobility and adaptiveness during its progress; the 
phlegmatic person, on the other hand, is slow to move, but 
when moved, " sets his teeth " and ploughs his way imper- 
turbably to the end. The sanguine person, sensitive and lively 
like the cautious, embraces opportunities of action with equal 
readiness and sets out with the same strong determining ten- 
dencies. But the strength of the tendency soon falls away, so 
that he often fails to carry the matter through. Nevertheless, 
his optimism makes him rapidly forget failure, and he is ready 
to embark on the next enterprise with the same easy confidence. 
In distinction from these three types, neither the choleric 
nor the melancholic temperament is capable of strong deter- 
mining tendencies. The choleric person, however, cannot 
" keep out of things," and though often checked by failure 
due to lack of concentrated effort, is by his sensitiveness 
spurred on to fresh exertions, and so generally ** muddles 
through somehow." The melancholic person shares the 
weakness of the choleric without his compensating liveliness 
of sense and movement. Thus he is both ineffective and 
apathetic, capable neither of a strong original effort nor of 
being sufficiently stung by failure to achieve success in the 
end. 

Some psycho-analysts hold that, like the difference be- 
tween the " introvert " and the " extrovert " to which they 
partially correspond (p. 145), these differences are set up in in- 
fancy .^ On the other hand, they may be, as is more generally 
believed, factors in original endowment. In either case they 
are, by the school age, characters which are alterable with 
^ See E. Jones, " Papers on Psycho- Analysis," 2nd ed., ch. xl. 



176 EDUCATION: DATA AND FIRST PRINCIPLES 

difficulty, if at all, and when present in a marked degree, 
must be taken carefully into account in the management of 
children. Having stated the conditions of the problems 
they present, we must leave the reader to consider the 
solutions. 



NOTES ON BOOKS, ETC. 

C. S. Sherrington, "The Integrative Action of the Nervous System" 
(Scribners, 1906), is the standard work on reflex action. W. H. Gaskell, 
"The Involuntary Nervous System" (Longmans, 1916), gives the present 
state of knowledge of the autonomic system. A brief account of Head's 
experiment is given in C. S. Myers, "An Introduction to Experimental 
Psychology" (Cambridge Manuals of Science and Lit., 1911), while H. Head 
has himself given a non-technical exposition on " Problems of Science and 
Philosophy" (Aristotelian Society Supplement, vol. ii., Williams and Norgate, 
1919). N. Ach's scheme of temperaments is quoted from his interesting 
lecture " Ueber den Willen" (Leipzig, Quelle and Meyer, 1910). His 
longer work, " Willenstatigkeit und das Denken" (Gottingen, Vander- 
hoeck and Ruprecht, 1905), deals fully with "determining tendencies." 
E. B. Holt, " The Freudian Wish " (Fisher Unwin, 1915), deals very interest- 
ingly with the "behaviourist " view of will, etc. For Seguin see H. Holman, 
" Seguin and the Physiological Methods of Education" (Pitman, 1914). 



CHAPTER XIV 

THE DEVELOPMENT OF KNOWLEDGE 

It is hardly possible to date or to describe the beginnings of 
a child's mental life, but it is likely enough that at birth the 
world is for him, as James said, " a big, blooming, buzzing 
confusion." His appetites and bodily needs and his dawning 
instincts determine the points at which he attacks this con- 
fusion and begins the long task of clearing it up, while his 
reflexes are, so to speak, the tools he uses. Passing by the 
earliest days, let us suppose a child old enough to "take notice," 
and let that notice, motived by the instinct of curiosity, 
fasten, say, upon a bright silver spoon. We all know what 
will happen; how watching, stretching, grasping, carrying 
reflexes will be set in motion until, after some " trial and error," 
the spoon is conveyed to the child's mouth. The reader will 
not fail to note that the analytic and synthetic powers of 
which we spoke in the last chapter are brought into play 
from the first moment of this incident. For, in the first place, 
the infant picks out the brightness of the spoon from its less 
attractive surroundings, and, in the second place, the mere 
perception of it as an object outside himself, more or less 
definitely shaped and placed, implies, as we saw, a considerable 
piece of organizing work performed by means of his cerebral 
cortex. But let us proceed. 

Next day the spoon comes again within his ken. He 
perceives it with obvious pleasure, and carries it once more 
to his moubh with a dexterity much increased by yesterday's 
successful effort. His behaviour leaves no doubt that his 

177 12 



178 EDUCATION: DATA AND FIRST PRINCIPLES 

cognitive " attitude " towards the spoon is not what it was 
at first ; but in what respects is it different ? All that we can 
safely assert is that, as the child now contemplates the spoon, 
its appearance is " complicated " or coloured by references 
to yesterday's experience, so that while the same it is yet not 
the same. The perceived shape and brightness, the cool 
feeling when the metal was grasped, the stretching, gripping 
and carrying, the triumph that attended the success of those 
operations, and lastly the delight of pressing a cold, hard 
body between the gums: all these items were, by the infant's 
analytico-synthetic activity, singled out and integrated into 
a unitary experience with a definite and coherent form; 
and when the spoon is again seen, the seeing takes place 
through the activity of the engram-complex in which that 
form was registered. In accordance with the general law 
(p. 53), much, perhaps most, of the activity of the complex 
remains below the level of clear consciousness; but it does 
not fail to produce definite effects above that level. Thus 
the "sense of familiarity" the babe enjoys at the second 
sight of the spoon may be referred to the fact that, having 
dealt with the object successfully before, he feels ready to 
react again; in other words, it probably consists (i.) in incipient 
tendencies, vaguely apprehended, to repeat the former 
movements, (ii.) in a revival of the feeling of successful self- 
assertion that attended them, and, in addition, (iii.) in some 
revival of the pleasure experienced when the spoon lay in his 
mouth. These elements fuse with the appearance of the spoon 
and give it its new character ; in the usual language of psy- 
chologists, they give it its meaning. 

Some time later his mother records proudly that baby 
has shown keen interest in a large wooden spoon lying on the 
kitchen table, and seemed to prove by his behaviour that he 
classed the novel object with the familiar silver one. This 
feat implies a much higher exercise of analytico-synthetic 
power. For it implies (i.) that the numerous shapes presented 



THE DEVELOPMENT OF KNOWLEDGE 179 

by the silver spoon, when held in different positions, have been 
registered as a distinct subordinate organization within the 
" spoon-complex," (ii.) that the similarly varying shapes of 
the wooden spoon can also awaken the activity of this organ- 
ization, although there is no other resemblance between the 
two objects, and (iii.) that the activity thus awakened carries 
with it enough activity of the spoon-complex as a whole to 
secure some degree of recognition. The qualification " some " 
is important; for the child's cognitive attitude towards the 
wooden spoon cannot be precisely foreseen. It may corre- 
spond to the thought " I have seen something like this before," 
or to " This, I feel sure, is a spoon, though I do not know 
why," or to " This must be a spoon, for though very different 
from the silver spoon, it has the same shape."i 

We may summarize what we have just said by the state- 
ment that the child is able to abstract the shape from the other 
qualities of the spoon, though he need not, in a given case, be 
aware that he has done so. The part here ascribed to abstrac- 
tion in the perception and recognition of objects has been 
illuminated by some interesting experiments of Dr. T. V. 
Moore. 2 Moore exhibited to his subjects a series of rows of 
fanciful figures, each row, after a very brief exposure, being 
replaced by another. All the figures were different, with the 
exception that one of them occurred in varying positions in 
every row. The subject was to indicate when he recognized 
clearly that the same figure had occurred more than once, 
and was then to give an account of his states of mind during 
the experiment. The results showed that the perception of 
the common figure passed through several stages. There 
came first a mere awareness that some sort of figure had been 
repeated ; then a more or less vague apprehension of its shape 

1 The infant cannot, of course, think these thoughts; but the difiEerent 
cognitive attitudes possible have to one another tlie same relations as these 
thoughts have. 

* " The Process of Abstraction" (University of California Publications in 
Psychology, vol. i., No. 2, 1910). 



180 EDUCATION: DATA AND FIRST PRINCIPLES 

as (for instance) circular or pointed; thirdly, a correct idea 
of the shape, but with doubt or error as to the orientation ; 
lastly, a true knowledge of its position as well as of its 
shape. 

Dr. Moore concluded that in visual perception the material 
before the sense is organized under " mental categories," of 
which some may be of the utmost generality and vagueness, 
others more specific and precise. We may speak of them 
as "concepts," or, following Mr. H. Sturt (p. 194), as "pat- 
terns " or " schemas "; but whatever name we give them, 
we must think of them not as passive, but as active things, 
which direct and govern apprehension just as determining 
tendencies direct and govern action. Indeed, it is evident 
that there can be no determining tendency which does not 
include in itself a pattern or schema of the action to which it 
prompts. And it will be noted that a schema, like a deter- 
mining tendency, is the activity of a complex which does 
much of its work in the unconscious. 

Most of the active concepts or patterns with which our 
minds are filled have been derived by abstraction from 
experience, but some must be regarded as innate. For 
example, there is in all human beings a tendency to build 
their perceptual experience into an outer world of separate 
" things," moving and acting upon one another in space and 
time. Here the categories are of the widest generality. On 
the other hand, instincts^ in animals and sometimes in man 
seem to contain schemas of a much more detailed character, 
as in the case of the bird that builds its nest according to the 
ancestral pattern. The number and nature of racial concepts 
lying between these limits is not easily determined. Dr. 
C. G. Jung points to the curious uniformities in the myths 
of primitive peoples, and holds that these ^xnress " arche- 
types " or racial categories " which coerce intuition and appic- 

1 Instincts may, of course, be thought of as mnate determining ten- 
dencies. 



THE DEVELOPMENT OF KNOWLEDGE 181 

hension to forms specifically human. "^ His view may be 
pressed too far, but it is clear that our power of seeing and 
understanding the world around us depends upon a power to 
read " patterns " into it, and it seems equally clear that 
some of these must be archetypal in Jung's sense, though 
they multiply greatly in the course of experience. Thus a 
doctor can diagnose a new case of illness, an engineer can see 
how a new machine works, a policeman can smooth out a 
difiicult tangle in the traffic, because their experience has 
provided them with categories, concepts, or schemas by means 
of which they can '* take hold of " the situation before them. 
And, as we all know, this power often works by means of 
which the expert can himself give but an inadequate account ;2 
for it consists mainly in the activity of complexes below the 
conscious level. 

In considering perception it is natural to give a large 
place to the facts of vision; but what we have said applies 
throughout the whole realm of the senses. It is evident, for 
instance, that to hear a melody is to grasp the musical pattern 
or schema that the notes express, and that when we recognize 
it from the opening phrases or played in a difierent key, we 
do so in virtue of the pattern registered as a subordinate 
organization in the original engram-complex. Similarly, in 
the recognition of a tram-car by its rumble, a book by its 
" feel," an orange by its smell, the sensations immediately 
before the mind are apprehended through the activity of 
concepts or schemas derived from previous experience. In the 
rumble the mind reads a moving tram-car ; in the odour, the 
taste and appearance of an orange; just as in a printed book 

1 Jung, " Instinct and the Unconscious" {Brit. Journ. of Psych., vol. x., 
No. 1, 1919). 

3 As in the anecdote of the dyer who could not communicate to others 
the secret of his wonderful power of mixing dyes. The better known story 
of the judge who advised a junior never to give reasons for his decisions, 
illustrates the further truth that the ' ' rational ' ' account we give of our 
actions maj'^ be very discrepant from the actual activity of the complexes 
from which they spring. 



182 EDUCATION: DATA AND FIRST PRINCIPLES 

it reads what the words mean. In this way while each of 
us is imprisoned in the circle of his own sensations, we are 
yet freemen of a common world; though some, being blind 
or deaf, miss part of it, and a few, like the blmd-deaf-mute, 
Helen Keller, can read it only in terms of the humbler 
senses. 

Perception, the earliest of intellectual activities, is the key 
by which all the rest may be understood. Philosophers have 
written as though an almost impassable gulf sundered the 
humble mental function the animals share with us from the 
lofty exercise of thought, reserved for man alone. This is 
but a special case of a misconception which we have already 
sought to correct (pp. 17-19,). Mind uses at all its levels the 
twin methods of analysis and synthesis ; the difference between 
the perceptions of a dog and the thoughts of a sage is a 
difference not in the nature of the process, but in its range 
and complexity, and in the materials with which it works. 

Let us examine the main points of this difference. We 
have seen that in ordinary perception the range of the cognitive 
act often travels far beyond what is immediately present to 
the senses : I hear not a mere rumble, but a tram-car ; I see 
not a mere yellow patch, but an orange. How far it may go, 
even in animals, is shown by the behaviour of a dog who, 
when his master dons a hat, plainly sees the promise of a 
joyous scamper out of doors. The cognitive acts of an 
engineer who grasps the working of a machine, of a farmer 
to whom sky and wind foretell a change in the weather, of a 
physician who reads in his patient's symptoms the nature and 
probable course of the disease, differs from the dog's chiefly 
in using as its vehicle a schema whose range and complexity 
is much greater still. Thus one mark of the higher mental 
act is a higher development of synthesis. 

A second mark is increased fineness of analysis or abstrac- 
tion. An intelligent dog can discriminate between his master's 
assumption of a silk hat and of a soft hat — reading the latter 



THE DEVELOPMENT OF KNOWLEDGE 183 

as a sign that he is to be taken out, the former that he is to 
be left at home; but a child's power of abstraction soon exceeds 
the utmost limits of canine analysis.^ For instance, a child 
of eight, confronted with an oblong, measuring, say, 6 inches 
by 4 inches, and divided up into inch-squares, can readily 
see by analysis that the squares fall into four rows containing 
six each, and so learns, without counting, that the oblong 
contains altogether 6x4 square inches. Moreover, he can 
carry the analysis to a stage still more significant in its 
potentiality ; for he can see that the property he has discerned 
in the figure before him must also belong to any oblong whose 
sides contain each an exact number of inches. In other words, 
he has the power of ignoring all the circumstances that dis- 
tinguish this oblong from others, and of attending solely to a 
property which, since it depends on the shape alone, must be 
present wherever that shape is found. It is hardly necessary 
to point out that this higher development of analytic power is 
the prime essential in mathematical and scientific reasoning. 
In mechanics, for example, we ignore everything about 
bodies, except the way they affect one another's movements ; 
in optics we attend only to their behaviour towards light; 
and so on. 

Side by side with the increase in analytic and synthetic 
power, higher mental acts show another characteristic. The 
intelligence of animals is, as psychologists say, confined to the 
perceptual level; that is, they do not, as a rule, concern them- 
selves with situations that are not suggested by objects or 
events actually before their senses. To this rule there are, 
no doubt, exceptions. A dog will announce by seductive 
whimperings that he would like a walk, or may (like the 
author's terrier) make the hint still plainer by seeking his 
collar spontaneously and laying it at his master's feet. It is, 

1 Miss E. M. Smith's little book, "The Investigation of Miad in 
Animals " (Cambridge Press, 1915), gives an interesting account of experi- 
ments on the range of intellectual power in animals, 



184 EDUCATION: DATA AND FIRST PRINCIPLES 

however, a special mark of men that they constantly concern 
themselves with objects and events which are not before 
their senses ; and this kind of mental activity is what we gener- 
ally have in view when we speak of thinking. In thinking, the 
mind deals with schemas or concepts cut loose, so to speak, 
from the things in the perceptual world to which they belong 
• — in a word with ideas. 

The power to think freely — that is, to entertain ideas 
without the presence and help of perceived objects — varies 
greatly with the maturity of the mind, with its acquired 
habits, and with its familiarity with the subject-matter. A 
child, for instance, may easily be led to find the general rule 
for calculating the areas of oblong figures, and in discovering 
it, is certainly thinking. But it is equally certain that he 
would not make the discovery at all unless his ideas were 
supported and their flow guided by contemplation of an actual 
oblong figure dissected into squares. His mind can treat 
the particular figure not as particular, but as a symbol of all 
possible oblongs; yet cannot reach a general truth about 
oblongs except through contemplation of the symbol. The 
minds of children and of ill-educated persons do much of 
their thinking by the aid of things used thus as symbolizing 
concepts which would otherwise elude their mental grasp.^ 
Even educated persons of good intelligence can " see " 
difficult ideas much more easily when they are presented in 
concrete symbolism, and there have been minds of the highest 
order that could work in no other way.^ Here is the psycho- 
logical justification for the use of models in teaching abstruse 
subjects. Undiscerning persons object to models on the 
ground that their use deprives the pupil of the stimulus to 

1 The reader will remember that the clownish Lance (" Two Gentlemen 
of Verona," ii. 3) could not explain the manner of his parting with his family 
except by using his shoes, his staff, and his hat as symbols for his parents, 
his sister and Nan the maid. 

2 E.g., the great Lord Kelvin, who confessed that he could never accept 
the electro-magnetic theory of light because he could not devise a model 
of it. 



THE DEVELOPMENT OF KNOWLEDGE 187 

employ his powers of thought and imagination; but we sef 
that, on the contrary, they are for some minds always, and 
for most minds sometimes, the best possible means of stimu- 
lating activity.! 

The use of pictures and diagrams comes under the same 
heading ; though since they are farther from solid reality than 
models, they are generally less effective thought-instruments. 
The lines, colours or shading of a picture or photograph are 
material objects which the mind takes not at their face- value, 
but as symbols by means of which it reaches and holds a 
certain schema or idea about the things portrayed. Similarly^ 
a little boy, busy with his " meccano," gathers from a diagram 
the schema for constructing, say, an elaborate model of a 
travelling crane, and could not keep so complicated an idea 
" in his head " except by repeated reference to the drawing 
where it is symbolized. The same explanation applies, in 
principle, to the use of symbols in algebra. An algebraic 
expression is simply a perceptual object whose form symbolizes 
some particular relation between numbers; and its use is 
first to enable the mathematician to hold the concept of this 
relation in mind, and next to pass from that concept to the 
concept of another relation which " follows " from the 
former. 2 

"When a person thinks without the aid of any perceptual 
object or symbol to guide his thoughts, his ideas are in the 
full sense " free." All of us can deal in this way with familiar 
objects and events, recalling the past, looking into the future, 
or pursuing in idleness the dreams of fancy; and more gifted 
and powerful minds can thus follow the ** way of ideas " far 

1 See John Adams, "Exposition and Illustration in Teaching" (Mac- 
millan, 1909), ch. xiii. 

^ E.g., the expressions c = (a+6)(a-6) and c = a2 - 62 symbolize 
two distinct relations that may obtain between three numbers; and the 
process of manipulation called " multiplying (a + h)hj [a-h)" is the means 
by which the algebraist proves that wherever the former relation obtains, 
tiie second one obtains also. 



EDUCATION: DATA AND FIRST PRINCIPLES 

siito remote realms of abstruse speculation.^ But even here 
thought needs the support and guidance of images, which, 
as we have seen, are mental copies of perceptual objects, 
including movements. Visual images, in particular, being a 
direct transcript of material objects, play a very great part 
in an average person's thinking and reasoning. Many 
descriptions of things would be almost unintelligible to most 
people unless they evoked visual imagery, and many argu- 
ments consist essentially in devices for calling up more or 
less definite pictures of the behaviour of things^ (see p. 161). 

We have reserved until last the most important of thought- 
instruments — namely, language. Language may be the 
vehicle of ideas either in the perceptual form of spoken or 
written words, or in the subtler guise of verbal images, visual, 
auditory or kinsesthetic. Its use is pre-eminently a social 
habit, and is found in a rudimentary form wherever animals, 
under the urge of the gregarious instinct, act together for 
defence and in pursuit of food. On a superficial view it would 
appear that, among civilized men, words are purely arbitrary 
signs whose meaning is learnt by association. But while this 
account is largely true, it is not the whole truth. Psycho- 

1 The great Sir W. Hamilton, the inventor of quaternions, is said often 
to have spent hours in mathematical thought unaided by written symbolism. 

2 The reader may try the following examples upon himself or a friend. 

(a) Description. — A certain "flying top" consists of three parts: (1) A 
wheel with spokes like the blades of an electric fan. The hub contains a 
small hollow cone whose point projects slightly so that the wheel cannot lie 
flat on a table. (2) A tube, grooved spirally within like a rifle-barrel, and 
ending in a cone which fits into the hub of tlae wheel. (3) A rod, bearing a 
spiral ridge like a screw, which fits into the tube. To start the top, you place 
the wheel on a table, fit the conical end of the tube into the hub, and holding 
the rod upright, press it rapidly down into the tube until it reaches the bottom, 
when you instantly withdraw the rod and tube. The wheel now rises from 
the table and flies across the room. 

(b) Argument. — B is a certain distance north of A, C the same distance 
east of B; therefore C is north-east of A. 

The study of such examples may convince the reader that it is important 
in many lessons to set oneself deliberately to evoke imagery in one's pupils. 
The teacher who does not himself use visual imagery freely (p. 161) often 
fails to keep in touch with his hearers, simply because he and they are em- 
ploying different symbols or vehicles for their ideas. 



THE DEVELOPMENT OF KNOWLEDGE 187 

logical causes have played a definite role in the history of 
word-forms and their meanings; and, in accordance wHh 
the law of recapitulation (p. 39), repeat their work at leasi" 
partially in every child who learns to speak. The behaviour 
of deaf-mutes shows how natural it is for human beings to 
find in facial movements, pantomime and bodily gestures, 
the means of communicating their feelings, knowledge and 
wishes ; and spoken language is, at bottom, but a more delicate 
apparatus of the same kind and origin. Thus words when 
they are not emotional (like " oh," " hush ") or onomatopeic 
(like "splash," "cuckoo") seem ultimately to be oral 
gestures, sometimes residua of, or natural substitutes for, 
larger bodily gestures, sometimes "sound-metaphors'' of 
independent origin.^ A child in learning to speak does not 
repeat the historical stages that brought the word to its 
present form; but impulses akin to the original attitude- 
and gesture-impulses probably do recur, and the spoken word 
becomes associated with them all the more readily because 
in its origin it was itself a refinement of attitude or gesture. 
These wider impulses sink, in time, into the unconscious, but 
remain part of the buried complexes whose activity gives the 
word its meaning.2 

^ The words there. — here, you — me, with their correspondents in a large 
number of widely diverse languages, seem obviously to embody resi^ectively 
an outwardly and an inwardly directed oral gesture. The difference be- 
tween mamma and fcipa, which also appears in correlated forms in a great 
many languages, appears to be a sound-metaphor: the softer sound 
symbolizing the female, the more vigorous the male parent (Wundt). 
Observe, too, the suggestion of shaking in such words as quiver, quagmire ; 
of clumsy movement in flounder, flop ; and the significance of the gr in 
grumble, groan, and the slang word grouse (Pearsall Smith). See references 
on p. 194. 

We are told that there are African languages in which the verbal sym- 
bols need to be supplemented by bodily gesture; so that you must, at night, 
talk beside a fire in order to "see" what a man says. 

2 In repeating Humpty Dumpty's cryptic verses one may become aware 
that the "mental attitude" expressed by such words as "if" and "but" 
is largely a bodily attitude : 

And he was very proud and stiff; 

He said, " I'd go and wake them, if " 

And when I found the door was shut 
I tried to turn the handle, but — — 



188 EDUCATION: DATA AND FIRST PRINCirLES 

This doctrine is supported by the common observation 
that words originally concrete in meaning tend to become 
abstract. The word " tend " is itself an example. The 
Latin tendo originally meant "to stretch," and may be 
regarded as a " vocal gesture " derived from, or at least 
connected with, a larger bodily gesture imitative of stretching. 
The use of the word and the gesture became registered to- 
gether in a single complex, so that when the word was employed 
alone, it still had behind it the activity of the whole complex. 
When the need arose to apprehend the subtler facts we express 
by " tendency," the earlier concept of stretching was used 
as a symbol by whose aid the notion could be apprehended 
and communicated. The word would thus come to express 
the activity of a new complex, but that complex would still 
contain the older one as its core, and would derive its energy 
therefrom by " sublimation." In this way we can see how it 
is possible to understand the meaning of a passage — such as 
the present paragraph — whose reading evokes little or no 
imagery except, perhaps, auditory echoes of the words them- 
selves. The words awaken the largely unconscious activity 
of engram-complexes which the synthetic power always 
inherent in mind rapidly organizes into a complex of new 
form and wider scope ; and it is this complex, growing as one 
reads, which determines the " attitude "towards the sentences 
wherein our awareness of their meaning is felt to reside. 

The tendency to employ primitive experiences as means 
for grasping and expressing the significance of more compli- 
cated and subtle facts must now be recognized as almost 
omnipresent in human mentality.^ It explains the forms 
of myth, ritual and religious creeds, it runs riot in dreams, 
and may be said, in short, to be the key to understanding 
almost the whole development of civilization (p. 50). In 

The reader, remembering pp. 160-2, will see that the meaning of object- 
names, such as " table," consists largely in the (unconscious) schemas of our 
activities connected with the objects. 

^ See E. Jones, " Papers on Psycho- Analysis," 2nd ed., ch. vii. 



THE DEVELOPMENT OF KNOWLEDGE 189 

the history of physical science, for instance, nothing is more 
striking than the way in which men have persistently sought 
to interpret recondite phenomena in terms of such familiar 
things as bodily exertion (" force," " energy,"), the behaviour 
of moving bodies (" atoms," " electrons "), or of water 
(" ether ").l Poetic imagination, following a different im- 
pulse, uses the same means. The poet is a man for whom 
the common sights and events of the world are symbols of 
things which the rest of us could never find without his aid. 
To the unimaginative man the yellow primrose is a yellow 
primrose, and ** nothing more."^ 

The foregoing discussion has covered,in principle, all forms 
of higher intellectual activity. It is, however, desirable to 
add further remarks upon two — invention and reasoning — ■ 
in which the creative aspect of the activity is especially 
prominent. 

An act of invention may either modify an existing schema 
in some essential details — a classic instance is the act of the 
ingenious lad who, by attaching strings, made the steam- 
engine he tended work automatically — or it may produce 
what is virtually a new schema — as when Arkwright, or some 
predecessor, transformed the spinning wheel into the spinning 
machine. But the invented schema, however novel, is never 
anything but a new synthesis of familiar schemas or their 
components. Bring together a pumping-engine and a tram- 
way-waggon, and you have a railway locomotive ; synthesize 
the gas-engine with the road-carriag6, substituting oil-vapour 
for gas, and you have the motor-car; and so on indefinitely. 

1 T. P. Nunn, "Aims and Achievements of Scientific Method" (Mac- 
raillan, 1906, and Proceedings of Aristotelian Society, 1905-6). 

2 Samuel Butler, who missed no chance of girding at Wordsworth, 
speaks ia his "Alps and Sanctuaries" of "the primrose with the yellow 
brim," adding "I quote from memory." The Rev. 0. A. Alington relates 
that he had once the joyful cxi^erience of reading a cojjy of the book in 
which a previous borrower had written " No " against the passage, and had 
entered in the margin the correct quotation ! This delicious anecdote is a 
perfect illustration of the couaoctioa between ioiagiaation and humour. 



190 EDUCATION: DATA AND FIRST PRINCIPLES 

The inventive mind possesses in a higher degree the analytic 
and synthetic powers common to us all. Unlike routine- 
bound minds, it readily separates the elements of things from 
their usual contexts, and it is fertile in new constructions. 
Above all, it has the energy that expresses itself in the strongly 
sustained purpose needed to make good use of those gifts. 

There is, in principle, no difference between this kind of 
invention and the invention of a writer like Defoe, who, given 
a certain imagined situation, produces in the adventures of 
Robinson Crusoe a plausible synthesis of possible incidents. 
The only distinction is that the schema of the romancer is 
for delightful contemplation, not for use. On the other hand, 
there is a substantial difference between invention and fancy. 
For fancy, although, like invention, it weaves its schemas out 
of real materials, takes no heed to make the pattern as a whole 
congruent with reality. 

Reasoning covers much the same ground as invention; 
for the essence of both lies in the deliberate search for a new 
schema, and in an intention that it shall be congruent with 
reality. The lazy boy who made his engine function by itself 
must have seen that the strings would " work "; Defoe saw 
that Crusoe could not have goatskin garments without the 
means of making them. Both, then, reasoned — that is, 
constructed schemas in which they believed that there was 
no element contradicted by other schemas derived from 
experience. Most of the reasoning of science — at least of 
non-mathematical science — is of this type. For instance, a 
geologist explains a fossil by the hypothesis that it is the 
petrified skeleton of an extinct animal that died where it was 
rapidly covered up by sea-mud or river silt ; for this is the only 
schema, congruent with reality, into which the facts will fit. 
The reasoning of the physical sciences differs from this type 
in two respects. In the first place, it is essentially analytic; 
that is, it does not consider things as concrete wholes, but 
seeks " laws," such as Newton's laws of motion, or the laws 



THE DEVELOPMENT OF KNOWLEDGE 191 

of magnetic attraction and repulsion, in which certain abstract 
features of their behaviour may be summarized. In the 
second place, it seeks, in a manner already indicated (p. 189), 
to interpret, and to reduce to unity, wide ranges of natural 
phenomena by means of such symbolic ideas as " force," 
" atoms," ** ether-waves." But, as the scientific reader will 
see, these subtler developments do not carry it outside the 
description we have given of the more elementary types. 

Reviewing the whole discussion, we may say that self- 
assertion, as far as it is expressed in cognitive activity, has 
always the same immediate aim — an aim that may be 
described as the intellectual control of the world over against 
which the individual maintains his creative independence. 
That aim appears, on the threshold of life, in acts of percep- 
tion; the babe who delights in the brightness of a silver spoon 
or recognizes it as a toy or an implement, has already achieved 
some measure of intellectual control over it. But as the 
mind matures, there grow out of this unconscious immediate 
aim three lines of conscious purpose, which, though they 
constantly come together, are perfectly distinct in character. 
These we may distinguish as practical, sesthetic and ethical. 
Let us consider them briefly in turn. 

The practical tendency of much of our cognition is obvious. 
It is obvious, for instance, when a traveller inquires the way 
to a place in order to get there, or v/hen a tyro asks an expert 
chaufieur to explain the uses of the levers, so that he, too, may 
drive the car. Scientific inquiry frequently aims directly 
at practical control, though in some instances the practical 
motive may be or seem to be absent. A schoolboy who 
seeks an explanation of eclipses certainly does not expect to 
be able to bring them about when he pleases ; but his mental 
attitude is, nevertheless, that of one seeking control. It is, 
in fact, clear that one's mental grasp of eclipses is incomplete 
until one can at least ■predict when they occur. This remark 



192 EDUOATION: DATA AND FIRST PRINCIPLES 

shows that the practical motive may lurk, in a subtle form, 
even in the most " disinterested " scientific thought. The 
chemist who affects to despise the industrial applications of 
his science still hungers for the knowledge that gives control 
over the transformations of matter; the "pure" geologist 
still presses for the kind of understanding of the earth's 
structure that we might ascribe to the demiourgos who made it. 
We must, however, admit that at this level the scientific tends 
to approximate to the aesthetic purpose which we will next 
examine. 

When the aim of cognition is practical, the analytic and 
integrative powers of mind carry their work only as far as is 
necessary for the task in hand. The anxious traveller takes 
note of the features of town or landscape only in so far as they 
are landmarks guiding him to his destination. A physicist 
or a chemist limits his observation to facts that may have a 
bearing on the question he is examining. The distinguishing 
mark of aesthetic activity is that it seeks after the perfection 
of the analytico-synthetic process as an end in itself, without 
regard to any further purpose it may serve. Here, in sub- 
stance, is the answer given by the Italian philosopher, 
Benedetto Croce, to the question, What is art ? — a question 
which, from the time of Plato, who regarded art (and con- 
demned it) as a mere imitation of nature, has sorely vexed 
the philosophic mind. Art and beauty, says Croce, are 
successful expression, or as we have put it, the perfect develop- 
ment of the analytico-synthetic process of intuition.^ The 

^ Thus what we usually think of as the artist's expression — the actual 
picture or statue or poem — is not the expression in Croce' s sense, but only 
a record of it and a means by which it can be communicated to others. 
The true " work of art " is, in his view, the perfect analytico-synthetic pro- 
cess that takes place in the artist's mind. Croce probably undervalues 
here the intimacy of relation between cognition and action (see pp. 160-1) ; the 
artist, we may suggest, arrives at his expression (in Croce's sense) only by 
expressing it (in the ordinary sense). It follows from Croce's position that 
whenever we truly "appreciate" a work of art, we repeat ourselves the 
creative act in which the artist gave birth to it. This corollary is, no doubt, 
substantially soimd, and is very important from the standpoint of resthetic 
traioiag. To lead pupila to "appreciate" is not merely to lead them to 



THE DEVELOPMENT OF KNOWLEDGE 193 

artist who creates a beautiful painting of a face or a landscape 
does not aim at producing a faithful copy of what is there 
for everyone to see; his purpose is to record the " intuition " 
or " expression " evoked from him as he contemplates his 
sitter or the country-side. He may even make a beautiful 
picture out of what is "naturally" ugly — that is, out of some- 
thing which frustrates the ef!ort of an ordinary person to see 
it and to feel it as an individualized whole. And when we 
have learnt how the artist's vision has transmuted the bare 
and ugly facts, we, too, may find beauty in them — that is, 
may be able to contemplate them in a successful act of 
expression. 

Similarly, no one troubles to inquire whether the CEdipus 
Rex or Othello are true stories. Yet, as these instances show, 
there is always in great art a congruence with reality that lies 
deeper than mere historical truth. That is why great art 
often has the highest ethical value. Conversely, the beauty we 
have noted as belonging to the world-wide visions of science 
springs from the fact that they are necessarily analytico- 
synthetic processes of great perfection. 

This remark brings us to the ethical purpose, where we 
are on better explored ground. We have already learnt that 
moral development begins in the compulsion a child feels to 
bring his impulses and desires in harmony with those of 
others (p. 150). Thus ethical knowledge is at first a special 
kind of practical knowledge — being practical knowledge 
applied to the control of one's own conduct in social relations. 
But, as his moral insight deepens, he comes to see that, while 
the end of ethical activity is always individual good, that good 
can be realized only if it is identified with a universal good. 
Henceforward, ethical cognition is a search for the universal 
principles of conduct which must be followed though the sky 

admire or to take pleasure in a beautiful thing, but to make them become 
ia a sense its re-creators. The reader will note how well this doctrine 
accords with what was said on pp. 78, 80. 

13 



194 EDUCATION: DATA AND FIRST PRINCIPLES 

fall. And in this direction, once more, the three ends of 
cognition may be found to coincide. For the saint, in his 
moments of greatest moral insight, may feel that he is in 
touch with the very foundations of the world's reality, and 
may gain the completest vision of its tragic beauty. 

NOTES ON BOOKS, ETC. 

E. B. TiTCHENER, "Experimental Psychology of the Thought-Pro- 
cesses," is a valuable criticism of recent experimental work on thought, 
determining tendencies, etc. H. Sturt, "The Principles of Understand- 
ing" (Cambridge Press, 1915), develops in a most interesting and instruc- 
tive way the notion of the "schema." The student should also read J. 
Dewey, " How We Think" (Heath, 1909). B. Croce, " Estetica" (1912), 
has been translated by D. Ainslie (Macmillan). A very clear account of his 
views is given in Wildon Carr, "The Philosophy of B. Croce "(Macmillan, 
1917), and they are compared with those of other philosophers in E. F. 
Carritt, "The Theory of Beauty" (Methuen, 1915). On the origin and 
development of gesture-language and speech, the serious student should 
consult W. Wundt, " Volkerpsychologie," vol. i, pt. i. (Leipzig, Engelmann, 
1904). An excellent semi-popular account of "word-making" will be 
found in L. Pearsall Smith, "The English Language" (Home Univ. 
Series). 



CHAPTER XV 

THE SCHOOL AND THE INDIVIDUAL 

As our argument has developed we have been led to give 
increasing weight to the social factors in school life ; and the 
reader may have an uneasy feeling that we have thus drifted 
away from the position we took up at the outset of our 
inquiry. To round off our task we must, therefore, consider 
more definitely the relation between school life and studies 
and the spiritual growth of the individual pupil. 

Few things are more deplorable than the weakening of 
individuality, the chilling of enthusiasm, the disillusion, that 
so often attend the progress of a boy through a school which 
has, and in the main deserves, the reputation of being " good." 
Such a school rarely fails to level up its weaker members, 
but cancels much of its good work by levelling down those 
of richer promise. In part this result is due to forces that 
cannot be wholly eliminated. The boy is always near to the 
barbarian, and his societies, if left to themselves, naturally 
develop the characters of a primitive tribe where custom rules 
with rod of iron, and eccentricity is ruthlessly suppressed. In 
part it is due to the excessive use of competition — in which the 
school reflects one of the greatest evils that afflict the modern 
world; for competition, like alcohol, though it may begin by 
stimulating, tends to bring men in the end to one dull, if not 
brutish, level. But behind and deeper than such causes one 
may suspect the influence of the erroneous ideas about the 
relation between the individual and society which were pointed 
out in the first chapter (p. 3). There is the thought, working 

195 



196 EDUCATION : DATA AND FIRST PRINCIPLES 

obscurely or openly held, that social conduct involves the 
sacrifice of individuality, not its enrichment; that it means 
self-surrender, not self -fulfilment. 

The root error here is the assumption that the difference 
between " selfish " and " social " conduct coincides with the 
difference between conduct that is, and conduct that is not, 
motived by the social instinct. Social factors often play an 
essential part in the most selfish conduct — as in that of the 
swindler who owes both his knowledge of human weaknesses 
and his skill in exploiting them to the possession of strong 
gregarious impulses. And the most clearly " social " conduct 
always implies a strong self behind it. For instance, the cul- 
tured missionary who cuts himself off from civilization to 
minister to a degraded tribe in a fever-haunted land, surrenders 
a great deal, but he does not surrender his self. On the 
contrary, his conduct is unintelligible except as the self- 
assertion of an unusually strong individuality. 

These examples bring out the true characters of selfish 
or anti-social conduct. There is conduct which, in the fine 
words of Kant, uses other persons merely as means, and not 
also as ends in themselves. This is the sin of the man who 
condemns others to degraded or empty lives in order that he 
may grow rich, of the mother who uses the devotion of her 
children simply for her own ease — in a word, the sin of ex- 
ploitation in its myriad forms. Again, there is the conduct 
of persons who, while making use of the gifts and labours of 
others, deny, in effect, the reciprocal obligation to put some- 
thing of their own creation into the common stock. One 
thinks here of the idle landlord or rentier, of the literary or 
artistic dilettante absorbed in the refinement of his own 
taste, of the great Cavendish concealing his wonderful scientific 
discoveries. Conduct of these kinds seems clearly to be 
selfish or anti-social, and anti-social conduct is, perhaps, 
* always of one of these kinds. 

As we have seen, developed conduct almost always includes 



THE SCHOOL AND THE INDIVIDUAL 197 

a social reference, for it issues from a self permeated with 
social factors. Thus it is easy to hold that social value or 
" utility " is the one criterion of good and bad conduct. 
But although this is the safest and best criterion for daily use, 
it may be doubted whether it is ultimate. It is at least 
possible that conduct is not good because it is " social," but 
rather social because it is good. Not to speak of sins of " self- 
indulgence," which are censured with a severity that takes 
little account of their probable social results, immediate or 
remote,! we have to recognize the absolute impossibility of 
assessing the social consequences of our most momentous 
decisions. Who, for instance, could determine, on grounds 
of social utility, the nice question whether a given person 
should devote his life to clearing up the obscurities in ^Eschylus 
or to improving the practice of intensive agriculture ? When 
we give due weight to such considerations, we find it impossible 
to judge conduct, in general, by any external criterion, and 
have to fall back upon the principle that human lives, like 
works of art, must be judged by their " expressiveness." 
However we interpret the phrase or conceive the fact, our 
bodies, or rather our " body-minds," are meant to be temples 
of the Holy Ghost, and though we are left free, each to work 
out his own plan, we are bound to make the building as fair 
as the materials and the powers at our disposal permit. Or, 
we may say, our ultimate duty is not to let our nature grow 
untended and disorderly, but to use our creative energies to 
produce the most shapely individuality we can attain. For 
only in that way can we be, as we are bound to be, fellow- 
workers with the Divine in the universe. This canon is not 
one by which we can mbcir^^re out our conduct beforehand; 
for a creation cannot be judged uniil it has appeared, and 
it may for a while baffle men's judgment even then. No 

1 Tlie reader rray debate witb himself the hypothetical case of Robin- 
son Crusoe getting drunk every night, and may easily find in ordinary life 
casuistical problems of the same type. 



198 EDUCATION: DATA AND FIRST PRINCIPLES 

one, for example, doubts now that Keats chose rightly when 
he deserted '* plasters, pills, and ointment boxes " for poetry; 
yet eminent critics of the time held with firm conviction the 
opposite opinion. But although the canon is not usable like 
a foot-rule, it may still be the ultimate standard of human 
worth. 

We conclude, then, that the idea that a main function of 
the school is to socialize its pupils in no wise contradicts the 
view that its true aim is to cultivate individuality. We have 
pointed out (p. 8) that this aim does not imply the cultiva- 
tion of eccentricity, nor assume that all children are potential 
geniuses. As Carlyle wisely remarks,^ the merit of originality 
is not novelty but sincerity, and that merit may be earned 
by one who is not, in the ordinary sense, original at all. But 
sincerity is an achievement possible only to those who are 
free to follow the larger movements of their own nature; to 
take from others not what is imposed upon them, but what 
they need to make their own. Hence, while the school must 
never fail to form its pupils in the tradition of brotherly 
kindness and social service, it must recognize that the true 
training for service is one that favours individual growth, 
and that the highest form of society would be one in which 
every person would be free to draw from the common medium 
what his nature needs, and to enrich the common medium 
with what is most characteristic of himself (see p. 5). 

Thus we reach once more the principle (p. 145) that the 
proper aim of education is positive, to encourage free activity, 
not negative, to confine or to repress it. What becomes, 
then, of the concept of discipline which is so essential in the 
traditional ideas about school training ? To gain a clear 
answer to this question, we must first distinguish between 
discipline and school order, and see that though they overlap 
and indeed interpenetrate, they are derived from quite 
different psychological roots. School order consists in the 

1 " Heroes," Lecture IV. 



THE SCHOOL AND THE INDIVIDUAL 199 

maintenance of the conditions necessary if school life is to 
fulfil its purpose; and, as we saw (p. 61), is most effective 
when based on imitation and the routine tendency. Disci- 
pline, on the other hand, is not an external thing, like order, 
but something that touches the inmost springs of conduct. 
It consists in the submission of one's impulses and powers 
to a regulation which imposes form upon their chaos, and 
brings efficiency and economy where there would otherwise 
be ineffectiveness and waste. Though parts of our nature 
may resist this control, its acceptance must, on the whole, 
be willing acceptance — ^the spontaneous movement of a 
nature in which there is an inborn impulse towards greater 
perfection or " expressiveness " ( p. 31). 

Thus the process of discipline is akin to consolidation 
(pp. 45-6); it may, in fact, be regarded as a higher type of 
consolidation, differing from the lower type in that it involves 
some degree of conscious purpose. We may properly speak 
of the movements of an athlete as disciplined ; for they have 
gained their perfect form and efficiency — in a word, their 
expressiveness — largely through conscious effort. Similarly, 
we may speak of a person as disciplined by circumstances 
when he has deliberately used the lessons of hard experience 
to give shape to his impulses and powers. But though a 
person may discipline himself, as those do who rise to greatness 
in spite of hostile circumstance, yet discipline is, in general, 
the influence of a wider or better organized mind upon one 
narrower or less developed. In all cases there is, in a dis- 
ciplinary process, a definite psychological sequence. First 
there must be something that one genuinely desires to do, 
and one must be conscious either of one's inability or of some- 
one else's superior ability to do it. Next, the perception of 
inferiority must awaken the negative self-feeling with its 
impulse to fix attention upon the points in which one's own 
performance falls short or the model's excels. Lastly, comes 
the repetition of effort, controlled now by a better concept of 



200 EDUCATION: DATA AND FIRST PRINCIPLES 

the proper procedure, and accompanied, if successful, by an 
outflow of positive self-feeling which tends to make the im- 
proved schema permanent. 

We have had (p. 140) a simple instance of this two-phase 
process in Jack's behaviour during and after his first tram- 
ride. The discipline a child gains at school from his teachers 
and his comrades is of the same character. It is a directive 
influence, which shows him the better way and stimulates 
him to make it his own. The discipline of a fine school 
tradition works in the same way. The eager boy is impressed 
by what he feels, however obscurely, to be an ample and 
worthy manner of life, and is proud to become an exemplar 
of it. Nor is there anything essentially different in the 
discipline derived from school studies, such as mathematics 
or science or classics . For here again , what the y oun g student 
should assimilate is the superior control of thought or ex- 
pression achieved by great investigators or writers. In short, 
his position is that of an apprentice striving to learn the trick 
of the master hand. 

We can hardly leave the subject of discipline without 
some reference to the place of punishment in the school 
economy. Here the essential point to seize is that the intention 
of punishment should be positive, not negative ; it should aim 
at helping the backslider to do willingly what he ought to do, 
rather than at preventing him from doing what is forbidden. 
Even in the treatment of crime it is now well established — 
though the fruits of the discovery are sadly slow in maturing 
— that mere repression is no cure, and that the true remedy 
lies in the " sublimation " of the criminal's misdirected 
energies (p. 55). Punishment may properly be used as a 
deterrent against acts, such as unpunctuality and disobedience, 
that clearly violate the school order which it is the common 
interest to maintain. But it has no moral effect unless 
approved by the general sense of the community. Disorderly 
and other mildly anti-social acts are often best punished by 



THE SCHOOL AND THE INDIVIDUAL 201 

mere exclusion of the offender from the common occupation ; 
the sight of other children happily busy while he is reduced 
to nauseous inactivity wakens the strongest motive to re- 
pentance. This principle does not, however, justify the per- 
nicious practice of " keeping in " children whose naughtiness 
is an irritability due to boredom, to insufficient sleep, or lack 
of fresh air or exercise ; to cut such a child off from his play is 
to withhold the specific remedy for his disease. In propor- 
tion as an offence assumes the character of a sin, the deterrent 
and retributive aspects of punishment should become entirely 
subordinate to the remedial; it should look not towards the 
unsatisfactory past, but towards the still hopeful future.^ 
One may feel shame when made to see oneself in the unpleasant 
character in which one appears to others, but a real " change 
of heart " comes only as one secures hold on a better way of 
life. The wise teacher, then, will not be contented merely to 
repress the symptoms of spiritual sickness, but will try by all 
possible means to remove its causes. And, as we have seen, 
those causes always consist in the disorderly, mal-adjusted 
working of impulses — attractions and repulsions, conscious, 
and still more frequently unconscious — which by prudent 
handling may be redirected into the ways of spiritual 
health.2 

To these few observations we add only one general remark. 
The conviction, once so deeply rooted in the teaching pro- 
fession, that punishment and the fear of punishment are the 
natural foundations of school government, is gradually being 
recognized as merely a barbarous superstition. Every 
teacher of wide experience now knows that a school in 
whose atmosphere the thunder clouds of punishment are 
always brooding may often show no superiority, as regards 

1 There is much wisdom in Mr. Bradley's epigram: " Only the spiritually 
rich can afford the luxury of repentance." 

2 Psycho-analysis is by no means an instrument for a layman. Never- 
theless, it is to the results of psycho-analysis that we must look to find 
methods, at once truly scientific and truly humane, of dealing with the moral 
lapses of yoimg people. 



202 EDUCATION: DATA AND FIRST PRINCIPLES 

visible order, over one where punishment is a rarity. 
OfEences must come and must be dealt with, but it is a sound 
principle to regard them, in general, as signs of mal-adjust- 
ment rather than of natural wickedness : that is, to take them 
as indications that there is something wrong in the curriculum, 
the methods of instruction, or in the physical or spiritual 
conditions of the school work and life. 

From the general tenor of our argument throughout the 
book it is clear that while the school must be a society, it 
must be a society of a special character. It must be a natural 
society, in the sense that there should be no violent break 
between the conditions of life within and without it. There 
should be no cramping or stifling of the citizens' energies, 
but room for everyone to live wholly and vigorously; no 
conventional standards of conduct, but only the universal 
canons and ideals ; no academic separation from the interests 
of the great world, but a hearty participation in them. On 
the other hand, a school must be an artificial society in the 
sense that while it should reflect the outer world truly, it 
should reflect only what is best and most vital there. A 
nation's schools, we might say,l are an organ of its life, whose 
special function is to consolidate its spiritual strength, to 
maintain its historic continuity, to secure its past achieve- 
ments, to guarantee its future. Through its schools a nation 
should become conscious of the abiding sources from which 
the best movements in its life have always drawn their 
inspiration, should come to share the dreams of its nobler 
sons, should constantly submit itself to self-criticism, should 
purge its ideals, should re-inform and redirect its impulses. 
In short, as Mr, Branford has finely said,^ the school should 
be "an idealized epitome or model of the world, not merely 
the world of ordinary affairs, but the whole of humanity, body 
and soul, past, present and future." 

1 The statement slioiild be understood as including the universities. 

2 " Janus and Vesta," p. 145. 



THE SCHOOL AND THE INDIVIDUAL 203 

This conception of the school as both a natural and an 
artificial society explains why it is difl&cult, if not impossible, 
to give an answer, valid in all circumstances, to some questions 
of educational policy. For instance, there are many who 
oppose boarding schools on the ground that they cut boys and 
girls off from their natural life in the home. But to this 
objection it may be replied that in a well-conducted boarding 
school there are a concentration of social life and a heightening 
of the social temperature which, in their disciplinary effect, 
more than counterbalance the loss of home influence. There 
is little hope of bringing this dispute to a definite issue. The 
modern tendency seems on the whole to favour the day school ; 
but the fine tradition of the historic English boarding schools 
is by no means moribund, and is, perhaps, destined to give 
birth to institutions^ that will greatly enlarge its influence 
on our national life. Meanwhile there is a healthy tendency 
for day schools to adapt to their circumstances some of the 
characteristic features of the boarding schools, and for board- 
ing schools to break from their monastic seclusion and to 
seek a closer contact with outside interests. 

Co-education is an equally intractable question. Co- 
educators aim, in the first instance, at purifying and strength- 
ening the bases of family life by teaching boys and girls to 
know one another, and at removing, through constant inter- 
course under natural conditions, the occasions for unhealthy 
curiosity and premature sexual excitement. And they also 
count upon a general beneficial influence of the ideals of each 
sex upon the character of the other, and work for some such 
fusing of moral traditions as we considered in a previous 
chapter (p. ] 52). Those who harden their hearts against these 
ideas lay stress on the' natural tendency for adolescent boys 
and girls to move apart and to develop unhindered their own 

^ For example, to boarding schools intended, like the Caldecott Ccm- 
niunity, to give to children of the working classes something of the advan- 
tages of public school life. 



204 EDUCATION: DATA AND FTEST PRINCIPLES 

ways of life.l This tendency, they maintain, is a plain indi- 
cation that the special virtues of the sexes are, at least in the 
later years of school, best cultivated where neither sex is 
distracted by the presence of the other. That co-education 
in childhood is a sound policy is, however, a view rapidly 
spreading, and there are few competent judges who do not 
deprecate anything like conventual segregation in the years of 
adolescence. In sum, we may say that the question how far 
free association of the sexes in work and play is deliberately 
to be limited or encouraged can hardly be decided without a 
completer collation of the evidence than seems at present 
available. 

The issue takes a different form in the controversy about 
the respective merits of a " general " and a " vocational " 
education. The upholders of vocational education are on 
firm ground when they emphasize the strong desire of the 
adolescent to lay hold of the realities of life (p. 87), and their 
opponents are in a correspondingly weak position when they 
deny that training for a specific occupation can have educa- 
tional value. In discussing the question we must take care 
not to cloud the issue by considerations relevant only to the 
present imperfect state of society. At the moment, we have 
before us this curious spectacle : that while schools which have 
been the strongholds of " liberal culture " are hastening to 
fit their curricula to the needs of modern industry and the 
professions, the strongest opponents of vocational training 
are among those who speak for labour. The attitude of these 
is easily intelligible. On the one hand, they claim for the 
poor the heritage of culture from which they have so long been 
unjustly excluded; on the other hand, they think they see 
behind the proffered gift of vocational education the hand of 
the exploiting employer. Let us be clear, then, that the 
merits of vocational training are here to be debated upon 
purely educational grounds. From that standpoint, it is 
1 C/. Slaughter, " The Adolescent," p. 28. 



THE SCHOOL AND THE INDIVIDUAL 205 

evident that some forms of vocational training are at once 
excluded from the purview of the school. It is useless to 
train a boy to be a policeman or a tram-conductor, wrong to 
train a girl with a view to her making cardboard boxes all her 
life. But when it is a question of training a future naval 
officer, a mariner, an engineer, a cabinet-maker, a builder, a 
farmer, the decision may be very different. Such occupations 
meet no trivial or transient needs. They have behind them a 
dignified history and a distinctive moral tradition. They 
have nursed fine characters and given scope to noble intellects 
and splendid practical powers. They cannot be worthily 
carried on without scientific knowledge or artistic culture. 
To school a boy in the tradition of one of these ancient occu- 
pations is to ensure (if it suits his ingenium) that he will 
throw himself into his work with spirit, and with a zeal for 
mastery that schoolmasters usually look for only in the elect. 
And it does more. Work which carries a boy directly towards 
the goal of his choice, work whose obvious usefulness gives 
him a sense of dignity and power, often unlocks the finer 
energies of a mind which a " general " education would leave 
stupid and inert. The boy's whole intellectual vitality may 
be heightened, his sense of spiritual values quickened. In 
short, the " vocational " training may become, in the strictest 
sense, ** liberal." 

We come, then, to much the same conclusion as before. 
Vocational education, if conducted in a liberal spirit, is per- 
missible, but cannot be made universal. On the other hand, 
in its concentration of interest on matters whose social value 
is evident, in its strong appeal to the practical activities, it 
contains elements which should, in some form, have a large 
place in every educational scheme.^ 

The question how long school education should last need 

1 ProfeiJ3or Dewey's " School and Society " is a powerful plea for basing 
the education even of young children upon the study of essential arts and 
occupations. His argument may be pressed too far, but its general validity 
is beyond question. 



206 EDUCATION: DATA AND FIRST PRINCIPLES 

not detain us, since it was, for this country, settled by Mr. 
Fisher's great Act of 1918. We now recognize, at least in 
principle, that " youth is the time for education," and that 
youth, even the youth of the poor, lasts until the age of 
eighteen. University education excluded, there are three 
natural educational periods corresponding to the three major 
waves of physical and mental growth (p. 147). First, there 
is infancy, merging into childhood between six and eight. 
This is the period for education in the home or the nursery 
school, where Froebel and Montessori should be the presiding 
deities. Next comes the wave of childhood, whose force is 
normally spent at an age not far from twelve. This should 
be for all children the period for "primary education " : that is, 
for a common scheme^ of instruction and training that meets 
the intellectual and moral needs of childhood and supplies 
the indispensable basis for the education of youth. Lastly, 
there is the wave which carries the boy or girl through ado- 
lescence, to the dawning of manhood or womanhood about the 
age of eighteen. This marks out the period of " secondary 
education." The extension of this name to all forms of post- 
primary education is, admittedly, a violation of present usage, 
but is, nevertheless; highly desirable. For it emphasizes a 
fact whose full recognition would be one of the greatest of 
educational reforms : namely, that the problems of educating 
youth — whether the youth of the aristocracy in the public 
schools or the youth of the slums in the new continuation 

^ It should be much nearer to the curriculum of an enlightened elemen- 
tary school than to the curriculum still imposed upon preparatory schools 
by the demands of some public schools. In other words, it should exclude 
the premature study of such subjects as Greek, Latin and Algebra. The 
only point really debatable is whether it should exclude French. The 
majority of the Prime Minister's Committee on Modern Languages were in 
favour of such exclusion from the standpoint of efficiency in teaching the 
language; but an important minority dissented. 

In the present state of society, the primary schools attended by the 
poor are necessarily burdened with tasks that are discharged in the homes 
of the better-to-do. But this fact does not entail or justify any serious 
departure from the general principle laid down above. 



THE SCHOOL AND THE INDIVIDUAL 207 

schools — are but variants of a single problem : the problem 
of dealing fruitfully with a life-period whose central fact is 
adolescence. This view does not exclude wide variations in 
curriculum. It implies only that these variations are no longer 
to be social distinctions, but are to be based solely upon 
differences in the ability, ingenium and needs of the nation's 
youth. Thus it implies, among other things, that the rich 
man's practically minded son, whose powers are starved under 
a literary regimen, would, as a matter of course, find salvation 
in a technical or craft school ; while the noble tradition of the 
English " grammar " schools would in time assimilate the 
modern "central" schools — now treated, anomalously, as 
" elementary " schools, but clearly destined to be the secon- 
dary schools of the people. ^ 

We come now to the last of our problems: the problem 
of the curriculum. Upon what principles are we to decide 
what is to be taught and the spirit of the teaching ? 

The most obvious criterion is that of usefulness. While 
the plain man generally likes his children to pick up some 
scraps of useless learning for purely decorative purposes, he 
requires, on the whole, that they shall be taught what will be 
useful to them in after-life, and he is inclined to give " useful " 
a rather strict interpretation. Let us beware of despising his 
view; for at bottom it is thoroughly sound. If he could 
think his thoughts out clearly, he would often be found to be 
not an enemy of culture, properly understood, but only of the 
academic folly that cuts culture off from its roots in common 

^ Purely admiaistrative questions are outside our province. Tlie 
author may observe, however, that he has long advocated a "clean cut" 
across the educational system at the age of eleven to twelve. Education 
below that age should be treated definitely as the education of children, 
and should be brought much more than at present under the control of 
women. After that age, the curriculum of boys and girls who do not enter 
upon a full-time "secondary" or "technical" course should be brought 
into definite relations with the course in the continuation school which they 
will attend from the age of fourteen or fifteen onwards. In other words, 
the course for all young people, from eleven or twelve to the end of their 
schooling, should be thought out and administered as a continuous whole. 



208 EDUCATION: DATA AND FIRST PRINCIPLES 

life. He is right in thinking that this tendency — the besetting 
temptation of the schoolmaster in all ages — does untold harm. 
The man who would expel the ancient classics from our schools 
is a less dangerous Philistine than the man who treats their 
pages chiejQiy as material for '* mental gymnastic ";l nor is his 
modern rival, the teacher of science, always guiltless of what 
is, at bottom, the same sin.^ Thus lay criticism, even when 
imperfectly informed, is valuable if only because it constantly 
brings us back to the true function of the school in relation 
to society (p. 202), and challenges us to examine the relevance 
of our teaching to the needs of life. 

The criterion of usefulness is, however, not always easy to 
apply. Take mathematics — a subject in whose usefulness 
the average parent has complete faith. There is no doubt 
that a certain power of handling figures is a very desirable 
accomplishment ; any person is likely often to be embarrassed 
if he cannot cast accounts, determine his profits and losses, 
and check his change. But it is difl&cult to show that the 
majority of people will ever need much more mathematical 
skill than this. How then are we to justify the universal 
study of the abstruser parts of arithmetic, to say nothing of 
the geometry and algebra that are "useful " only in certain 
professions ? Nonplussed by this difl&culty, the plain man 
will generally admit that, though some kinds of learning may 
not be directly useful in life, they may be indirectly useful in 
as much as they give valuable " mental training." But that 

1 " The trade in classic niceties, 
The dangerous craft, of culling term and phrase 
From languages that want the living voice 
To carry meaning to the natural heart; 
To tell us what is passion, what is truth, 
What reason, what simplicity and sense." 

Wordsworth: Prelude, Bk. VI. 

The whole poem is an invaluable document for the theory of education 
for individuality. 

2 cy. " Tlio Now Teaching," ch. v. A brilliant student recently informed 
the author that while at school she never conceived science as having refer- 
ence to anything that happens outside a laboratory I 



THE SCHOOL AND THE INDIVIDUAL 209 

position once conceded, the schoolmaster has licence to in- 
dulge to the full his inveterate penchant for formalism. He 
may teach uninterested boys to construe Latin, because 
although they will forget the Latin at the earliest opportunity, 
they will have acquired " exactness of thought " and the 
priceless power of conquering difficulties ; he may make them 
spend weary hours in "simplifying" formidable algebraic 
expressions, because in that way one gains " accuracy of 
mind " ; in short, he will claim the right to continue doing all 
the things that seem so unreasonable to the unenlightened 
outsider. 

Here is the famous doctrine of " formal training," which 
asserts that facility acquired in any particular form of 
intellectual exercise produces a general competence in all 
exercises that involve the same " faculty." Its paradoxes 
were exposed by Professor John Adams by a reductio ad 
absurdum that will always be one of the most delightful 
passages in pedagogic literature ;i and its truth has been 
tested — and found wanting — in many instances where it 
could be tried at the bar of exact experiment .2 Yet it is 
difficult to suppose that there is no truth in a view which 
holds so firm a grip upon teachers and has seemed unquestion- 
able to many acutely observant minds. In what, then, does 
its truth consist ? 

Our study of discipline (p. 128) suggests an answer. A 
subject such as mathematics represents a tradition of intel- 
lectual activity that has for centuries been directed towards 
a special class of objects and problems. In generation after 
generation men, sometimes of outstanding genius, have 
studied those objects and worked at those problems; accept- 
ing, correcting, expanding the methods and knowledge of 
their predecessors and handing on the results of their own 

1 " The Herbartian Psychology applied to Education," ch. v. 

2 Dr. W. G. Sleight's experiments (see p. 220) seem to prove conclusively 
that memorizing a particular kind of material produces no general im- 
provement of memory. 



210 EDUCATION: DATA AND FIRST PRINCIPLES 

labours to be treated in the same way. There has grown up 
thus a distinctive type of intellectual activity, exhibiting a 
well-marked individuality, and informed by a characteristic 
spirit. The student who is thoroughly schooled in the subject 
will make this spirit his own; the ideas and mental habits 
proper to it will become ingrained in his nature, and he will 
tend to bring them into play wherever they can be applied. 
A lawyer, for instance, will reveal his legal training in treating 
any question of general rules or the estimation of evidence, 
however remote it may be from his professional interests — 
as Gilbert of Colchester said of the great Bacon, a Lord 
Chancellor will write on science like a Lord Chancellor. So a 
modern chemist may be heard to complain of a fellow-investi- 
gator, trained in the sister-science, that he attacks chemical 
problems like a physicist.^ 

The history of thought constantly exemplifies the same 
principle. For example, Newton, preoccupied by ideas of 
gravitational attraction, carried the " astronomical view of 
Nature " into all departments of his scientific studies, and 
so laid the foundations of modern molecular physics and 
atomic chemistry. And not only so; it is not extravagant 
to say that the thinkers of the eighteenth century, schooled 
in the Newtonian ideas, dealt in what we may call the astro- 
nomical spirit even with political and social problems ; just as 
their successors, schooled in Darwinism, have dealt with them 
in terms of the biological notion of evolution through natural 
selection. 2 

We conclude, then, that the training produced by an 
occupation or a study consists primarily in a facility in apply- 

^ Mr. G. K. Chesterton has somewhere gibed at the man who would 
decide the question of human immortality from the standpoint of an electri- 
cal engineer. But can an electrical engineer do otherwise ? We can none 
of us escape from the habitudes and outlook that belong to our training. 
That is why men must differ in opinion to the end of time, and why large 
ranges of truth will always be inaccessible to each of us. 

2 Mr. Branford points out what loss our national life has suffered through 
the modern degradation of agriculture, which has deprived it of one of the 
most valuable sources of trained intellect and judgment. 



THE SCHOOL AND THE INDIVIDUAL 211 

ing certain ideas and methods to situations of a certain kind, 
and in a strong tendency to bring the same ideas and methods 
to bear upon any situations akin to these. If to this state- 
ment be added what we have said about the permanence of 
the qualities generated in a sentiment (p. 146), the reader will 
have before him practically all the facts about " mental 
training " that will stand examination. 

Our view of the curriculum now shapes itself as follows. 
The school must be thought of primarily not as a place where 
certain knowledge is learnt, but as a place where the young 
are disciplined in certain forms of activity — ^namely, those that 
are of greatest and most permanent significance in the wider 
world. Those activities fall naturally into two groups. In 
the first we place the activities that safeguard the conditions 
and maintain the standard of individual and social life: such 
as the care of health and bodily grace, manners, social 
organization, morals, religion; in the second, the typical 
creative activities that constitute, so to speak, the solid tissue 
of civilization. The latter can be easily identified. What a 
loss civilization would sufier if all that the words " art " and 
" science " stand for were obliterated ! What a poor thing it 
would be if the poet ceased to dream and sing, if there were 
none to " handle the harp and pipe," if the hand of the 
craftsman forgot its cunning! 

In the school curriculum all these activities should be 
represented. For these are the grand expressions of the human 
spirit, and theirs are the forms in which the creative energies 
of every generation must be disciplined if the movement of 
civilization is to be worthily maintained. Taking the second 
group first, every complete scheme of education must com- 
prise (i.) literature, including at least the best literature of the 
mother-land; (ii. ) some forms of art, including music, the most 
universal of the arts ;i (iii.) handicraft, taught with emphasis 

' The inferior place now given to art is one of the gravest defects of the 
curriculum, especially in secondary schools. 



212 EDUCATION: DATA AND FIRST PRINCIPLES 

either on its aesthetic aspect, as in weaving, carving, lettering, 
or on its constructional aspect, as in carpentry and needle- 
work; (iv.) science, including mathematics, the science of 
number, space and time. History and geography should 
appear in it in a double guise. On the one hand, history 
belongs with literature as geography belongs with science. 
On the other hand, they should have a central position in 
the curriculum as the subjects in which the human movement 
is, as such, presented and interpreted : history teaching the 
solidarity of the present with the past, geography the 
dependence of man's life upon his natural environment, and 
the interdependence of human activities all over the globe.^ 

The activities of the first group cannot, from their nature, 
be treated as " subjects," though they should be inspired 
and nourished by the pupil's studies and must to a varying 
extent be guided by definite teaching. Physical health and 
bodily grace, for instance, cannot be taught as French is 
taught, though, as regards health, the pupil should gain 
hygienic ideals and knowledge in his science lessons, and, as 
regards bodily grace, there may be lessons in " eurhythmies," 
in addition to the training of voice, gesture and carriage which 
will be gained in the dramatic and oratorical exercises that 
will form part of his literary studies. Similarly, the pupil 
will learn the ideals of government and social organization 
in the exercise of his duties as a citizen of the school society, 
though his lessons in history (** civics ") should here have 
much direct and indirect influence. 

Of religion substantially the same things must be affirmed. 
Few will dispute the assertion that no department of school 
activity is in a more unsatisfactory state than " religious 
training." It would be unjust to charge upon the schools a 

1 CJ. J. Fairgrieve, " Geography and World Power," pp. 343-44 
(Univ. of London Press, new ed. 1919). The cultivation of language, with 
the dependent arts of reading and writing, is not mentioned specifically in 
our list, because, although it must have its separate lessons, it is so 
f uudamental as to be involved in practically all the activities of both groups. 



THE SCHOOL AND THE INDIVIDUAL 213 

fault in which they simply reflect the confusion and be- 
wilderment that weaken the spiritual energies of all the 
civilized peoples. There is, however, no hope of remedy- 
ing the disaster, until the character and history of religion as 
a natural activity of the human spirit have been properly 
analyzed, and a teaching procedure based on that analysis 
has been worked out and courageously applied. 

It would be arrogant to offer here more than a few tentative 
remarks upon so tremendous a theme. In religion there are 
two things, carefully to be distinguished. One we may call 
the religious spirit; the other is theology, which is a theory 
of the objects that evoke the religious spirit. No man in 
whom the religious spirit stirs can altogether avoid a theology. 
Atheism itself is a religious theory — one that excludes God, 
because, like Laplace's cosmogony, it finds no need for that 
hypothesis. The essential marks of the religious spirit are 
the recognition that there are objects of supreme and universal 
worth which rightly claim our reverence and service, together 
with a sense that, though in our weakness and un worthiness 
we must ever be their " unprofitable servants," yet to deny 
their claims or to fail in loyalty to them is shameful and 
dishonouring. Thus a man may reveal the religious spirit 
in devotion to truth or to art, or in the loving service of his 
fellows ; such devotion and service being felt, as we have said, 
as a Divine charge which he may not refuse, though its 
form, varying with the form of one's individuality, need not 
be the same for him as for another (p. 197). 

The religious spirit, like all large movements of our nature, 
inevitably takes on a social character. Men who serve the 
same ideals will come together to share the warmth of their 
devotion or to confirm their faith, to preach or to hear their 
gospel. Thus the religious spirit will always have its church, 
if it be only an " ethical society " or an art club. And where 
there is a church there will surely grow up a ritual — that is, 
some form of routine charged with spiritual symbolism (p. 64). 



214 EDUCATION: DATA AND FIRST PRINCIPLES 

In religious training the first tiling is to awaken and feed 
the religious spirit. It often finds its nutriment in strange 
places. It has, for example, been justly remarked that boys, 
at an age when they might seem spiritually dead, pursue 
games with what can only be described truly as religious 
fervour. To " play the game " and to " be just and fear not " 
are for them completely equivalent expressions. A wise 
training would deliberately set about to sublimate this religious 
energy into wider social forms instead of leaving it locked 
up in its primitive narroAV channel. l 

Of school studies, literature is from the present standpoint 
the most important ; for 

books which lay 
Their sure foundations in the heart of man 

have more power than anything, except the contagion of a 
noble character, to heighten the sense of life and of its values. 
It is for this reason deplorable that the reverence that set the 
Bible apart as a book by itself has largely defeated its own 
aim. In the interests of religious training nothing is more 
desirable than that the Bible should be removed from its 
unnatural isolation, and restored to the company of books 
read and loved for their own sake. And if we should not 
forever treat Bible poetry and story merely as occasions for 
moral disquisition or theological interpretation, but should 
let it deliver its own witness, quietly, to man's spiritual 
experience, so, when we desire to appeal specifically to 
that experience, we do unwisely to confine attention to its 
pages. There are many fervent Christians who count the 
dialogues of Plato among the documents of their faith.2 

^ The exaggerated cult of athletics too often does the latter. It is 
instructive to observe that a man who is in most respects a reprobate may 
still show in " sport" a quasi-religious sense of duty and honour. 

2 A headmaster friend tells the author that one of his prefects recently 
chose as the " lesson " for the day a passage from the Phfedo which he was 
at the time reading in class. Such an incident illustrates well the natural 
catholicity of the adolescent, as well as his sensitiveness to the spiritual 
value of literature. 



THE SCHOOL AND THE INDIVIDUAL 215 

Upon the ritual aspect of school religion we can say here 
nothing more than is contained or suggested in a previous 
chapter (Ch. VI), The standing danger with regard to school 
" services " is the one to which Wordsworth refers so scathingly 
in his lines upon compulsory college chapel : 

Was ever known 
The witless shepherd who persists to drive 
A flock that thirsts not to a pool disliked ? 

and it can be avoided only by courageous and candid study of 
the actual spiritual needs of young people of different ages. 

As we come to what we have called theology, we approach 
by far the most difficult problem, the one with which it is least 
possible to deal profitably. There are here two hopelessly 
discordant policies. One is the policy of those who hold that 
a school should draw its whole life from some historic religious 
society with its centuries of experience and its traditional 
creed and ritual ; the other, of those who would leave the duty 
of giving definite shape to children's ideas about the source 
of the Divine to the churches and home teaching. These 
conflicting views and the several compromises between them 
we must leave as they are. We must, however, insist that 
success here, as elsewhere in education, can be hoped for only 
if the concepts offered to young people are adjusted to their 
actual experience and state of development (p. 153). Neglect 
of this principle must often set up complexes which will later 
reveal themselves in the form of hostility to all religious ideas 
— a phenomenon with which those who have the confidence 
of adolescents are familiar. 

The subjects of the curriculum are, we have said, to be 
taught as activities. This means, for example, that in teaching 
science our aim should be "to make our pupils feel, so far as 
they may, what it is to be, so to speak, inside the skin of the 
man of science, looking out through his eyes as well as using 
his tools, experiencing not only something of his labours, but 



216 EDUCATION: DATA AND FIEST PRINCIPLES 

also something of his sense of joyous intellectual adventure." 
In short, all subjects should be taught in the " play way," 
care being taken that the " way " leads continuously from 
the irresponsible frolic of childhood to the disciplined labours 
of manhood (pp. 83-88). In this process there will naturally 
be, in all the subjects, stages showing a community of char- 
acter, and analogous to stages in their historic development. 
The first is a stage whose characters are summed up in the 
"pleasure-pain principle." This is represented by "nature 
study," and by the love of myth, legend and marvellous 
travellers' tales, the common matrix out of which the pursuit 
of literature, history and geography are to grow. Gradually 
the " reality principle " asserts its sway. History becomes 
separated from stoiy as the tale of what has really happened, 
and story itself must have verisimilitude ; interest in science 
becomes a passion to understand how machines work, how 
things are made, how the life of plants and animals is sus- 
tained. In adolescence the synthetic activity involved in the 
pupil's intellectual adventures often becomes their most 
marked feature. His imagination is captured by the majestic 
generalizations of science, he seeks a synoptic view of 
history, and takes pleasure in the logical completeness of a 
geometrical system. 

It would be out of place to follow these ideas into their 
applications. There is, however, a last general question which 
must not be set aside. The school, as we have pictured it, 
is a select environment where the creative energies of youth 
may work towards individuality under the best conditions. 
Does that conception imply that every pupil shall be free to 
take from it or to ignore whatever he pleases ? If so, would 
not education be reduced to an anarchy ofEensive to common- 
sense, corruptive rather than formative of character ? If not, 
does not the principle we have so persistently asserted turn 
out to be but a high-sounding phrase ? 



THE SCHOOL AND THE INDIVIDUAL 217 

Happily for our comfort, we need accept neither horn of 

this alarming dilemma. Of a child it can generally be said 

with more truth than of any man, humani nil a se alienum 

puiat. A normal child's appetite is as varied as it is vigorous , 

and he can rarely resist the impulse to emulate another's 

exploits. Thus it is not often diflS.cult to make him take his 

intellectual meals, provided the fare is properly chosen and 

attractively set out. As he grows older, other normalizing 

factors come into play: shame at ignorance or inferiority, 

zeal for the honour of his form or house, a sense of duty, a 

desire to please his teachers and a readiness to accept their 

point of view, and on top of these, the tendency to do the 

accepted thing because it is accepted. Still later, at the age 

when, under the existing order, specialization is held to be 

desirable, caprice is checked partly by the pupil's knowledge 

that certain subjects, some perhaps distasteful, are necessary 

ingredients in his professional studies, partly by his discovery 

that the subjects nearest to his heart cannot be pursued far 

without the help of others — as a student of history or science 

finds that he cannot get on without some grinding at foreign 

languages. Thus it is safe to predict that a schoolmaster 

bold enough to dispense with all compulsions and skilful 

enough to maintain the proper atmosphere would find that, 

under the influence of these forces, things would settle down to 

much the same outward condition as before. But, while 

no miracles would happen, and boys and girls would remain 

boys and girls, sometimes idle and sometimes wayward or 

worse, there would be in the school life as a whole a sincerity, 

a vigour, a dignity, that are hardly attainable under the 

authoritarian tradition. 

The reader may press the case of a pupil who withstands 
the social forces tending to drive him to naturally distasteful 
studies. Is he to be allowed to leave school ignorant of an 
essential subject simply because he chances never to have 
felt its attraction ? It would be fair to counter this question 



218 EDUCATION: DATA AND FIRST PRINCIPLES 

with another. Does the disaster here contemplated never 
happen under the present system ? Do we really succeed 
in forcing unwilling students to assimilate what we think they 
ought to know ? But the tu quoque argument generally 
covers an attempt to evade an issue. Let us face the issue 
and admit that in our ideal school the ultimate veto lies with 
the pupil. There are considerations that will make this 
state of affairs seem less scandalous than it at first appears. A 
pupil who resists the appeal of a subject has often been known 
to turn to it later with great zeal, and soon to make up the 
headway he had lost. This observation, which every ex- 
perienced teacher can confirm, should convince us that the 
apparently wayward movements of a child's mind are generally 
controlled by deep currents of his being which it is highly 
imprudent to ignore (see pp. 54-6). If the resistance 
persists to the end, it is better to cut the loss rather than to do 
violence to the pupil's nature. ^ After all, if we once admit 
that minds of varying types have an equal right to exist, we 
shall be ready to see that the interests of a boy or a girl are 
rarely so erratic as not to offer the basis of a synthesis of 
studies that will perform all the essential functions of an educa- 
tion. Moreover, though it may seem to a teacher deplorable 
that a pupil should leave school with wisdom at one of her 
main entrances quite shut out, this feeling expresses a pro- 
fessional prejudice rather than the judgment of the greater 
world. The world, indeed, is widely tolerant of ignorance 
in most matters, provided it is balanced by competence in 
others. And here we must always remember two highly 
significant facts: first, that rebels against the Procrustean 
tactics of the schoolmaster have, in numberless instances, 
proved surprisingly competent in after-life; and, secondly, 
that most of these, including some who have placed the world 

* At least one headmaster of an important public school has advocated 
letting a boy drop the study of all languages but his own if he shows a per- 
sistent distaste for them. 



THE SCHOOL AND THE INDIVIDUAL 219 

deeply in their debt, so far from repenting of their youthful 
intransigence, have continued to be the severest critics of the 
system against which their inarticulate protests were once 
raised in vain. 

It must be admitted that schools of the type we have con- 
sidered in this chapter at present flourish most successfully 
in Utopia, where teachers are all men and women of character 
and genius, where administrative difficulties scarcely exist, 
and, above all, where the school is the organ of a society 
infinitely more enlightened than our own. The fact is, 
however, irrelevant to the value of our argument; for it is 
the proper function of an ideal to point beyond the range of 
present possibility. The only question really relevant is 
whether it points in the right direction. That question 
must be left to the judgment of the reader, who will decide 
whether we have justified the position outlined in the first 
chapter, and shown it to be firmly based upon the nature and 
needs of man and society. 

We stand at an hour when the civilization that bred us is 
sick — some fear even to death. We cannot escape from the 
duty of seeking a cure for its distemper, any more than from 
the responsibility that lies, in some measure, upon us all of 
having brought it to its present pass. But however good our 
will, however happy our inspiration, the problems we and those 
who came before us have created are problems we cannot 
hope ourselves to solve ; they must be solved, if at all, by the 
generations that will take up our work when our place knows 
us no more. Thus the question we have debated is of no 
mere academic interest. It concerns all who would fain 
believe that men are not wholly the sport of circumstance or 
the puppets of fate, but that their own wills shape the decrees 
which determine, slowly yet inevitably, " the doubtful doom 
of humankind." To all such it must be important to be 
assured that though our children cannot build a fairer world 



220 EDUCATION: DATA AND FIRST PRINCIPLES 

on any other foundation than our own, yet they are not bound, 
unless in our folly we will have it so, to repeat forever our 
failures ; that they have in them a creative power which, if 
wisely encouraged and tolerantly guided, may remould our 
best into a life far worthier than we have seen or than it has 
entered into our hearts to conceive. 



NOTES ON BOOKS, ETC. 

" Education Reform " (P. S. King, 1917) contains reports by the present 
author and others dealing more fully with points of curriculum and organiza- 
tion touched on in this chapter. W. G. Sleight, " Educational Values and 
Methods " (Clarendon Press, 1915), contains the best review of experiments on 
formal training with a discussion of their educational bearing. The doctrine 
of the curriculum sketched on pp. 211-12 is closely similar to that given 
in B. Branford, " Janus and Vesta " (Chatto and Windus, 1916), a masterly 
work full of profound reflections on educational questions. Professor John 
Dewey's works (especially "The School and Society " and " Scliools of To- 
morrow") should be known to all students. On religious instruction see 
two wise and eloquent little books by E. T. Caaipagkac', "Converging 
Paths" and "Religion and Religious Training" (Cambridge University 
Press, 1916 and 1918). T. Raymont, " The Use of the Bible in the Educa- 
tion of the Young " (Longmans, 1911), is an eminently useful and suggestive 
work. H. BoMPAS Smith, "Boys and their Management at School" 
(Longmans, 1905), though written from a more conservative standpoint 
than the present work, contains many excellent observations on punishment, 
etc. G. Bernard Shaw's essay on Parents and Children, prefixed to the 
volume of plays entitled "Misalliance," is a valuable tractate on several 
questions raised in this chapter and throughout the book. 



INDEX 



Ability, theories of, 111 ; tests of, 114 
Abstraction, nature of, 179 
AcH, N., 173-4, 176 
Adams, John, 9, 22, 139, 185, 209 
Adolescence, 56, 85, 150, 153 et 

seq. 
Esthetic activity, 79, 192 
Alexander, S., 22, 29, 32 
Alington, Rev. C. A., 189 
American Army tests, 114 
Amoeba, behaviour of, 16-17 
Anaiytico-synthetic process, 172 et 

seq. 
Appleton, R. B., 63 
Archetypes (Jung), 180 
Armstrong, H. E., heuristic method, 

91 
Association, types of, 44 
Athletics, cult of, 214 
Automatic processes, 29 
Autonomic nervous system, 166 
Autonomy of life, 11 
Axon (of neurone), 165 

Backwardness, measurement of, 110 
Baden-Powell, Sir R. S., 85, 103, 

149 
Baldwin, J. M., 159 
Ballard, P. B., 46, 110, 147 
Barker, E., 9 
Bama*do Homes, 105 
Beauty, 79, 192, 194 
Beneke, E., 22 
Bergson, 40-1 

Bible, the use of the, 214, 220 
BiNBT, A., mental tests, 108 et seq., 

118; on suggestibility, 126 
Blackbtjrn, Miss M., 122 
Body-mind (Bosanquet), 18, 19 
Book, W. F., on typewriting, 168 
Bosanquet, B., 3, 7, 11, 20, 22 
Boy Scouts, 85, 149 
Bradley, F. H., 3, 76, 161, 201 
Branford, B., 152, 202, 210, 220 
Breathing, physiology of, 25-6 
Bureau of Educational Experiments, 

103 
Burt, C. 110, 118 
Butler, Samuel, 19, 22, 189 



Caird, E. and J., 3 

Caldecott Community, the, 75, 203 

Campagnac, E. T., 220 

Carlyle, T., 112, 198, 203 

Carr, H. Wildon, 14, 40, 41, 194 

Carritt, E. F., 194 

Cell-body, 165 

Central intellective factor, 113, 116 

Cerebral cortex, 172 

Character, 116, 118 

Chesterton, G. K., 99, 210 

Childishness and childlikeness, 149 

Cleverness, 117 

Clifford, Sir H., 107 

Co-education, 203 

Cognition and action, 161; growth 

of, 178 et seq. 
Conation, conative process, 20 
Concepts, nature of, 180 
Condillac's statue, 163 
Conduct, development of, 150 et seq. ; 

social and anti-social, 196-8 
Conscience, 156 
Conservative activities, 24-6 
Consolidation, 46, 167, 199 
Continuation schools, 56, 206 
Conversion (sudden), 49 
Cook, H. Caldwell, 92, 103 
Corner, A., 152 
Creative activities, 24, 27-8 
Croce, B., 192, 194 
Crowd-psychology, 124 
Curriculum, contents of, 206, 21 1-12; 

principles of, 206 et seq. 

Dancing, 72, 120 

Darbishire, a. D., 22 

De Bary, a.. 12 

Dendron and dendrites (of reurone) 

165 
Descartes, R., 13-14, 18 
Determining tendency, 44 
Dewey, J., 194, 205, 220 
Diagrams, use of, 185 
" Diary of a Dead Officer," 8 
Discipline, 62, 198 et seq. 
Disposition, primary and secondary 

34-5 
Dramatic method, 91 



221 



222 



INDEX 



Dreams, 50 

Deevee, J., 69, 136-7, 139 

Deiesch, H., 12, 22, 27 

Emotions, 55-6, 125, 138-9, 160 

Energy (superfluous), 68 

Engram, engram-complex (defined). 

35 
Epicritic sensibility, 132, 171 
Ethical activity, 150 et seq., 193, 

195-8 
Eurhythmies, 60 

Evolution and culture-spread, 119 
Expressiveness, 31, 192, 197 
Extroversion, 145, 175 

Fabee, J. H., 131 

Faiegeieve, J., 212 

Fancy, 190 

Fatigue, 73 

Fisher Act, the, 206 

Formal training, 209-11 

Feakce, Anatole, 7 

Feazee, Sir J. G., 66 

Feeeman, a., 67 

Free will, 1 74 

Feeud, S., 47 et seq., 145-6 

Feoebel F., 83, 90 

Galton, Sir F., 104 ei seq. 

Gaenett, J. C. M., 117, 118 

Gaskell, W. H., 176 

General education, 204 

George Junior Republic, 92 

Girl guides, 103 

GoocH, G. P., 9 

GOEING, C, 118 

Geeen, T. H., 3 

Gregarious instinct, 149 et seq., 153-4 

Geoos, K., 69, 70, 87 

Haldane, J. S., 23, 25, 26, 32 

Lord, 3, 
Hall, W. Claeke, 75, 103 

G. Stanley, 39, 41, 71, 159 
Handwriting, teaching of, 169 
Haeeison, Miss J., 65, 67 
Haet, B., 57, 80, 118, 129, 158 
Haetog, M. M., 41 
Hate, psychology of, 144 
Haywaed, F. H., 67, 105, 118 
Head, H., 134, 171, 176 
Hegel, G. F., 3, 4, 9 
Helvetids, 104 
Henderson, Y., 25 



Heebaet, neo-Herbartians,104 ei seq. 
Herd instinct, 149 
Hetheeington, J. W., 9 
Hierarchy (conative), 28, 142 
HoBBES, T., 3, 4, 9 
HoBHOUSE, L. T., 9, 22, 159 
Holman, H., 176 
Holmes, E., 92 
Holt, E. B., 32, 176 
Horme (defined), 21 
Hormic hierarchy, 28-30, 112 
HuEY, E. B., 170 

Ibsen, H., 88 

Ideals of life and education, 2, 5 

Ideas, nature of, 184 

Imagery, types of, 161; use of, 186 

Imagination, 189 

Independence of organism, 23 

Individuality (nature of), 10 

Inner speech, 161 

Insanity, 80-3 

Instinct (defined), 133 

Intellectual control, 191 

Intelligence and instinct, 131 et seq. 

tests, 108 et seq. 
Interest, doctrine of, 30 
Introversion, 145, 175 
Invention, 189 
Involimtary nervous system, 166 

James, W., 46-7, 53, 125, 139, 147, 

156, 157, 158, 177 
Jennings, H. S., 15 et seq., 22 
Jeeemiah, 99 
Johnson, Dr. S., 50 
Jones, Eenest, 49, 53-4, 57, 175, 188 

Sir H., 3 
Jukes family, 105 
Jung, C. G., 47 et seq., 57, 180, 181 

Kant, I., 196 

Keatinge, M. W., 1, 9, 91, 105, 108, 

118, 129, 139 
Kellee, Helen, 28, 182 
KiDD, B., 108, 118, 152 
Kimmins, C. W., 91 

Lane, Homee, 55, 92 et seq., 97, 103 
Language, psychology of, 186 et seq. 
Learning by doing, 162 
by experience, 36 
Le Bon, G., 129 

Little Commonwealth, 55, 92 el seq. , 
103 



INDEX 



223 



LoEB, J., 14, 22 
Long, Dr. C, 51 
Love, psychology of, 144 

Make-believe play, 71, 80 et seq. 
Malebeanche, X., 69 
McDoTJGALL, W., 40, 41, 73, 129, 

USetseq., 139, 149, 154, 159, 167 
McMillan, Miss M., 164 
McMuNN, N., 92, 103 
Meaning, 178 

Mechanistic view of life, 14, 22, 106 
Memorizing, 63, 67 
Memory, conscious and unconscious, 

19-22; Beegson and McDottgall 

on, 40-1, 45-7 
Mental age, 109 
Misdemeanours of children, 55 
Mitchell, W., 129 
Mneme (defined), 22; racial, 38 
Models, use of, 184 
MoNTESSOEi, Dr. M., 83, 90 ei seq., 

96 et seq., 103, 163, 169, 174 
MooEE, T. v., 179 
Moral education, 99 et seq. 

tradition, 151-3 
Morality, development of, 150 
Moegan, C. Lloyd, 15, 119, 129, 139 

T. H., 12, 27 
MoEEis, W., 79 

MUIEHEAD, J. F., 9 

Multiple personality, 158 

MtJNSTEEBEEG, H., 115, 118 

Myees, C. S., 118, 176 

Nageli, C. W.. 12 

Natural periods of education, 206 

goodness, doctrine of, 99 et seq. 
Negative self-feeling and instinct, 

138, 141 et seq., 149 
Nervous system, described, 164 et seq. 
Neurones, types of, 165-6 
New ideals in education (Reports of 

Conferences), 55, 56, 85, 122 
NicoLL, Maueice, 50, 57 
Nursery schools, 206 

Optic thalamus, 172 
Order (in school), 61 
Organization (school), 96" 
Originality, 117, 122; and imitation, 
120 

Pateick, G. T. W., 76 
Patterns (ideas), 180 et seq. 



Pavlov, I. P., 36 
Peael, R., 16 
Peaeson, Kael, 104, 118 

Perception, nature of, 177 et seq.; 

and thought, 1^2 
Peeey, J., 162 
Pfistee, 0., 67 

Pigmoid stage of development, 39 
Planaria, behaviour of, 16-17 
Play and work, 75 ; and art, 78 
Play-way, the, 92 
Pleasure-pain principle, 148, 216 
Positive self-feeling and instinct, 

138, 141 etseq., 149 
Practical control, 191 

work, 162 
Peideatjx, E., 129 
Primary education, 206 

school (defined), 60; curriculum 
of, 206 
Peince, Moeton, 158 
Protopathic sensibility, 134, 171 
Psycho-analysis, 31, 48 et seq., 201 
Punishment, 201 

Raymont, T., 220 
Read, Caeveth, 39, 149 
Reading, teaching of, 169 
Reality principle, 148, 216 
Reasoning, 161, 190 
Recapitulation-theory, 39, 187 
Receptors, 17, 165 
Recognition, nature of, 178 
Recreation, 73 
Reflexes, primary and secondary, 

166-7 
Regulation, organic and p8ychic,25-7 
Relaxation, 74 
Religious instruction, 212-15 
Rendel, Miss L., 75 
Repetition, love of, 59, 62; in 

teaching, 62 
Repression, 49, 200 
Resistance (unconscious), 52 
Rhythm, 59 
Ritual (defined), 64 
RiVEES, W. H. R., 51, 52, 65, 119, 

134, 149 
Rousseau, J. J., 90, 99 
Routine and school order, 61 
Rusk, R. R., 118 

Schemas (in perception, etc.), 180 

et seq. 
Schiller, F. von, 78 



224 



INDEX 



Schools, boarding and day, 203; 

primary and secondary, 206 
Scratch reflex, 166 
Secondary education, 206 
Seguin, 163, 176 
Self-assertion (defined), 24 
Self-feeling, positive and negative, 

138, 141 et seq., 149 
Self-government in schools, 94, 101 
Self-regarding sentiment, 154 et seq. 
Sbmon, R., 22, 34 et seq., 41 
Senses, the, 170 
Sensori-motor reactions, 164 
Sentiment (defined), 143 
Shand, a. F., 78, 135-6, 143, 144, 

146, 159, 174 
Shaw, G. B., 89, 123, 223 
Shelley, P. B., 8, 99 
Sherrington, C. S., 172, 176 
Simpson, J. H., 94 et seq., 103 
Sinclair, Miss M., 8 
Skill, acquirement of, 167 ei seq. 
Slaughter, J. W., 159 
Sleight, W. G., 209, 220 
Smith, E. M., 183 

H. BoMPAS, 56, 220 

L. Pearsall, 187, 194 
Social heredity, 62, 107 

instinct, 149 et seq., 196 
Society, the school as a, 202 et 

seq. 
SOLLAS, W. J., 66 
Sotjthey, R., 59 
Spearman, C, 111 et seq., 118 
Speech, cultivation of, 123 
Spencer W. B.,and Gillen, F. J., 65 
Standard deviation, 110 
Stentor, behaviour of, 15-16, 34 
Stern, W., 147 
Stevenson, R. L., 45, 80, 81-2 
Strachan, J., 162 
Sturt, H., 180, 194 
Subjects, free choice of, 216 
Sublimation (defined), 54 
Suggestibility, suggestion, 126-8 
Sully, J., 67 
Symbolism (imconscious), 50 

in science, poetry, etc., 188 
Symbols, perceptual objects as, 184 
Sympathy, 124 
Synapses, 165 



Teacher, the "new," 97, 100 
Temperament, 174-6 
Terman, L. T., 118 
Theology, 213 

Thinking, nature of, 184 et seq. 
Thompson, D'Arcy, 14 
Thomson, J. A., 22 
G. H., 113, 118 
Sir J. J., 162 
Thorndike, E. L., 45, 111, 121, 

139 
Times (Educational Supplement), 

149 
Titchener, E. B., 194 
Tradition in education, 102; in 

schools, 62, 153 

Unconscious invention and memory, 
19-22 

Unconscious the, 47 et seq. 
Unity in diversity, 10, 35 

Veblen, T., 151-2 
Vocational education, 88, 204 
tests, 115 

Wallas, Graham, 61, 129, 138, 149 

Watt, H. J., 41 

Waugh, Alec, 76 

Waves of growth, 147, 206 

Webb, E. (on character), 116, 118 

Welton, J., 9 

Westebmarck, E., 151 

Westlake, Miss M. A., 103 

Whipple, G. M., 118 

White, W. A., 57 

Whitehead, A. N., 89 

Will, nature of ,173; training of, 174; 

forms of, 174 
Winch, W. H., 80 
Wolf-cubs, 103, 148 
Wolff, G., 118 
" Woodcraft Chivalry," 103 
Words, origin of, 186 
Wordsworth, W., 189, 208, 214, 

215 
Work and play, 77-8 
Writing, psychology of, 43 
WuNDT, W., 187, 194 

Young, E., 86 



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